Omar Sosas Sense

Omar Dykes tears it up big-time on this marvelous live outing. Pulling tunes largely from his then-current Hard Times in the Land of Plenty album, Dykes and his band deliver the goods with loads of panache and attitude for a hometown crowd hanging on every note. Dykes' voice is poised somewhere between Howlin' Wolf and Bob Seger, while his guitar style is a Texas version of John Fogerty's work with Creedence, but the sound he produces out of all this is totally unique. The disc is loaded with solid Dykes originals like "Mississippi Hoo Doo Man," "Same Old Grind," "Hard Times in the Land of Plenty," and a wild encore performance of Jerry McCain's "Rock'n'Roll Ball." One great little package.

After celebrating his 2012 Grammy-winning "Echoes of Love", Omar softens the mood to serenade us with the romantic melodies of "Daytime Dreamer". Featuring six brand new tracks and five previously released selections, the familiar splashes of Omar's signature world textures (oud, duduk, violin and guitar) weave back and forth in a sublime dance with his exquisite piano compositions.

These last years, Omar Sosa has been travelling a lot. In seven African countries, he met some musicians and recorded with them. The result is a remarkable album, a true symbiosis between traditional African musics and jazz.

Now on his 14th release for approximately ten different labels, Texan Omar Dykes keeps the faith by re-recording some of his better tracks, and adding a few new covers. While it looks on paper to be treading water, this is really one of the band's strongest releases, since the material - which has often been inconsistent - is top-notch, and the new Howlers are a crack unit with impeccable chops. Omar attacks and rearranges these songs with the experience of having played them for years, in many cases making these versions more definitive than the originals, an unusual occurrence when an artist revisits his own work…

With every recording Omar Sosa releases, his horizons continue to broaden within the context of world ethnic fusion, but with Across the Divide, he's bettered himself yet again. This collection of jazz-influenced, Latin-tinged music crosses the disparate genres of country folk and tribal sounds, recognizing the migration of the banjo from Africa to the Eastern seaboard of America, and percussion from the griot village to the rural Mid-Atlantic. In collaboration with vocalist and story teller Tim Eriksen, Sosa merges rhythm and ancestry via inspiration from Langston Hughes, John Coltrane, King Sunny Ade, Pete Seger, and contemporary bluesman Otis Taylor as popular reference points.

Though they share an ancestral connection to Africa, the respective birthplaces of piano virtuoso Omar Sosa and kora Maestro Seckou Keita, Cuba and Senegal, are separated by the Atlantic Ocean. When the pair met in 2012, Seckou admired Omar for his musical spirituality, whilst Omar saw in Seckou a rare ability to collaborate while retaining his musical identity. Their debut album, Transparent Water, was released to acclaim in 2017. Recorded during lockdown, the pair’s second album, SUBA, is a hymn to hope, to a new dawn of compassion and real change in a post-pandemic world. Joining Omar and Seckou in the studio, and for live performances, is the inimitable Venezuelan percussionist Gustavo Ovalles.

Although no new ground is covered on The Screamin Cat, Austin-based Omar and the Howlers simply continue to forge ahead, creating another energetic blues and boogie disc. Luckily, the Howlers have never stuck to one style of blues; they aren't purists, which allows plenty of room for a hopped-up mixture of swamp blues, Memphis soul, roots rock, and whatever else it takes to get their audience moving. Their party ethics are personified on The Screamin Cat by songs like "Party Girl," "Steady Rock," "Snake Oil Doctor," and the title track. Lead guitarist Omar Dykes' gravelly Howlin Wolf roar remains intact while Howler musical duties are shared by Bruce Jones on bass (three tracks); Rick Chilleri on drums (one track); Malcolm "Papa Mali" Welbourne on guitar, B-3, and bass; and B.E. "Frosty" Smith on drums, percussion, B-3, and Fender Rhodes.