How Omar Sosa found his rhythms

Omar Sosa didn’t know what to expect when he landed in Oakland in the fall of 1995. While the Cuban-born pianist was a rising star on the Havana music scene through his work with pop singers Vicente Feliu and Xiomara Laugart, he reinvented himself during a two-year South American sojourn when he discovered an obscure outpost of Afro-Ecuadorian culture in the northwestern port town of Esmeraldas.

After a brief stay in Mallorca, Spain, he moved to the Bay Area looking to connect with African-American culture. One of the first musicians who caught his ear was Berkeley multi-instrumentalist Peter Apfelbaum. They didn’t have many opportunities to play together at the time, but Sosa took close note of what Apfelbaum was doing with his Hieroglyphics Ensemble, a sprawling world-jazz group that artfully combined West African percussion, reggae, Afro-Cuban rhythms and advanced jazz improvisation.

“I was in shock,” says Sosa, 46, from his home in Barcelona, where he’s lived for the past decade. “I arrived from Spain and heard Peter playing with a great band with Josh Jones on drums. Peter was on sax and keyboard, and the music was deep and full.

“I said in my heart: This is the music I want to do.”

Sosa went on to launch his own band, an ensemble with a Hieroglyphics-like more-is-more sensibility encompassing Yoruba incantations, hip-hop rapping, Moroccan chants, and R&B belting, all woven together by his percussive piano work. But it wasn’t until about three years ago that Sosa devised a project to collaborate with Apfelbaum, spinning off his 2008 album “Afreecanos” (Ota Records).

Featuring London-based American drummer Marque Gilmore, a drum ‘n’ bass pioneer who worked widely with Joe Zawinul, Mozambican electric bassist Childo Tomas, and Apfelbaum on tenor, soprano and bamboo saxophones, various flutes, piano, melodica and sundry hand percussion instruments, the quartet performs Monday at Kuumbwa. Bay Area percussion master John Santos augments the group at Yoshi’s-San Francisco on Wednesday, when Sosa kicks off the San Francisco International Arts Festival.

For Sosa, Apfelbaum has turned into a musical soul mate with a complementary creative vision.

“Peter’s a master,” Sosa says. “He’s the white guy in the band, and he’s more African than all of us, in terms of his deep spirit in the African tradition.”

A product of Dr. Herb Wong’s pioneering program in the Berkeley public school system introducing music instruction and improvisation in kindergarten, Apfelbaum was weaned on musical freedom.

Displaying prodigious multi-instrumental skills before he was a teenager, he soaked up an international array of sounds. By the late 1970s, he had formed the Hieroglyphics Ensemble, a proving ground for future jazz stars such as trumpeter Steven Bernstein, guitarist Will Bernard, saxophonist/trumpeter Peck Allmond, and bassoonist Paul Hanson.

The band gained such a formidable reputation that trumpeter Don Cherry, a seminal avant-garde musician and leading force in the development of world jazz, featured the group on his 1990 A&M album “Multikulti.” Based in Brooklyn for the past decade, Apfelbaum leads a New York version of Hieroglyphics, though in recent years he’s been more visible through his work with Cuban drummer/composer Dafnis Prieto’s Si O Si Quartet and Steven Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra.

“Omar and I have a lot of common ground musically,” says Apfelbaum, 50. “I’m a bit older, but we grew up listening to the same stuff.

“Like Dafnis, he came up in Cuba experiencing all kinds of music, the traditional Afro-Cuban folklore, and then went to music school in Havana and studied the European classical tradition. But he and his friends had trouble getting their hands on jazz recordings, and in Berkeley we had trouble getting the Cuban music we wanted. When someone got a copy of a recording by Los Muñequitos de Matanzas it was precious.”

The other members of Sosa’s quartet bring essential rhythmic components to his sound. Sosa met Tomas just days after the he moved to Barcelona in the late 1990s.

Steeped in southern African grooves, “he puts this thump in my music,” Sosa says. “The music comes from me, and he puts the stamp of Africa on it in the way I always dreamed.”

Gilmore, a founding member of the Black Rock Coalition, is a more recent addition to the fold. Sosa first heard him with Joe Zawinul and realized his loose but metronomic beat would be an ideal anchor for his ensemble.

“We all play percussion,” Sosa says. “As long as everybody respects their own tradition it all fits. Marque’s got this African-American soul. I tell Childo, you don’t need to be Ron Carter or Christian McBride. You just need to be you.

“When everybody listens to each other and shares our own traditions, a lot of beautiful things happen.”