Omar Sosa & Seckou Keita featuring Gustavo Ovalles

£23

80 minutes (no interval)

The Atlantic Ocean separates Cuba and Senegal, the respective birthplaces of piano virtuoso Omar Sosa and kora maestro Seckou Keita, a distance diminished by their shared ancestral connection to Africa. When the pair met in 2012, Seckou loved Omar for his musical spirituality, whilst Omar saw in Seckou a rare ability to collaborate but not lose his identity. Their debut album Transparent Water (2017) was hailed as ‘beautiful, rhapsodic… spiritual’ (Songlines) and ‘mesmerising, evocative and sophisticated’ (World Music Central).

Sosa has released over 30 albums during an incredible career that has included nominations for seven GRAMMY or Latin GRAMMY awards; Keita is a multi-award winner, most recently as the prestigious BBC Radio 2 Folk Musician of the Year (2019). Recorded during lockdown and released in October 2021, Sosa and Keita’s second album SUBA is a hymn to hope, to a new dawn of kindness and real change in a post-pandemic world, a visceral reiteration of humanity’s perennial prayer for peace and unity. Joining Omar and Seckou in the studio and for live performances is the inimitable Venezuelan percussionist Gustavo Ovalles.

Sosa and Keita deliver a work that variously ebbs, flows and sparkles." ★★★★ Jane Cornwell, Jazzwise

A powerfully elegant statement of joy over shared musical discovery." Felix Contreras, NPR

Seckou wrote this song in a hotel room in Paris before the beginning of his tour with Omar in 2017. The first time they played it together they looked at each other: "Man! This is the first song we gonna record on the second record.” It became a tour favourite and a regular feature of the final encore. “If we didn’t play it, we didn’t feel good,” Seckou says. The music has a gentle yet epic quality, yearning with quiet force, its strength in its circularity, spiralling upwards.

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A Mwldan Production