Omar Sosa @ The Freight // Berkeley

Sunday, July 19, 2026
Doors: 6:00 PM; Show: 7:00 PM.

The Freight
2020 Addison Street
Berkeley, CA 94704

(510) 644-2020
info@thefreight.org

Tickets: $29 – $49. Click here or see below.

Video:

Biography:

7-time Grammy-nominated Cuban composer, pianist and bandleader Omar Sosa celebrates the debut album with his East Bay-based Latin-world-jazz-groove project Quarteto Americanos, featuring saxophone master Sheldon Brown, drummer extraordinaire Josh Jones, and heavyweight baby bassist Ernesto Mazar Kindelán. The recording, entitled We Are Not The Headliner, captures the very heart of Quarteto Americanos, a sonic universe in which Latin roots converge with the worlds of jazz, classical, and hip-hop. It’s a deeply personal sound built on the art of dialogue – a steady, soulful conversation between friends who share a common bond with complete freedom and humility. It’s a musical landscape both sophisticated and authentically grounded.

Omar Sosa is a Cuban-born pianist, composer, and bandleader whose musical horizons span world jazz, Cuban, Caribbean, Latin American, European, and African traditions. Over a three-decade career including some 38 recordings, Sosa has gained a devoted following, while garnering numerous commissions and residencies, Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts support, the Smithsonian Lifetime Achievement Award, two BBC Radio 3 World Music Awards, four Grammy nominations, and three Latin Grammy nominations.

Video 2:

Sosa’s creative trajectory embodies the expansive perspective of a visionary artist who has taken Monk’s uncompromising attitude to heart. Rooted in Afro-Cuban percussive, dance, and spiritual traditions, intimately versed in a range of contemporary musical forms, but defying easy labels, Sosa’s finely textured compositions and ensemble leadership complement, engage with, and amplify the animating talent of his collaborators through a varied palette of astonishing musicality.

Omar Sosa possesses an incomparable capacity to bring the most diverse traditions into fruitful juxtaposition, moving through and far beyond his influences, from the folkloric to the classical, while sustaining a singular cosmopolitan voice. He is an artist in constant search of new combinations, in a joyous display of expressive generosity and creative freedom. A liberating spirit of musical revelation beyond category, Omar takes an improvisatory approach to everything he plays.

Sosa is a listener at heart, and a scintillating one. His extraordinary musical journey has led from Cuba to Ecuador’s African-descent communities, the San Francisco Bay Area Latin jazz scene, and engagement with artists from the Caribbean, Brazil, North America, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and North, East, and West African nations. He possesses an uncanny capacity to bring the most diverse traditions and artists into fruitful cohesion, moving through and far beyond his many influences.