Omar Sosa

Namibians are a week away from being afforded the opportunity to enjoy Grammy Award quality latino jazz piano music closer to home. .This will happen on 27 November when Grammy Award winning Cuban pianist Omar Sosa performs live at the National Theatre of Namibia.

It's been awhile since we've surfed around the old blogosphere to see what some of my fellow world music writers are up to, so let's get to it! Over at SoundRoots, S.A. Stevens has me cracking up with a few haiku-style world music CD reviews, inspired (in a roundabout, curmudgeonly sort of way) by Twitter. At Spinner.com, Steve Hochman is talking with Norwegian composer John Balke, whose latest project, Siwan, combines musicians from roughly a gazillion different traditions into something that is, as Hochman puts it, "nearly describable. Nearly." They've provided a few sound clips, and I genuinely don't know what exactly I'm hearing (perhaps we can call it "world-jazz-plus" or something to that effect), but it does sound intriguing! Rocking our way over to RootsWorld, we can take a look at another world-jazz visionary, Omar Sosa, who released a CD called Across the Divide: A Tale of Rhythm and Ancestry and simultaneously performed a week-long residency at New York City's legendary Blue Note jazz club. RootsWorld was there for both, and gives us an excellent look at this artist who really digs deeply into the music of the African diaspora in ways that not many have. Lastly, let's make a stopover closer to home, at About.com's Children's Music site, where Warren Truitt has reviewed B is for Bob, an album of Bob Marley songs remixed and re-released for the younger set. Though it may be youthfully appropriate, Warren thinks that Ziggy Marley, who produced the album, may have done a bit too much tweaking in some places. From what I've heard of the record, I have to agree - you might be better off just finding the track listing and purchasing each of the songs individually, in order to burn your own mix CD, if for no other reason than to avoid the children's chorus that has been added to Small Axe. Yikes!

The jazz pianist and longtime collaborator Childo Tomas pay a visit to NPR's Studio 4A to play music steeped in the Afro-Cuban tradition, but fueled by Sosa's teeming imagination and eclectic inspirations.