Customer Reviews

Pictures of Soul

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With Pictures of Soul, Omar Sosa and Adam Rudolph have figured out a new way to play music.

What Sosa and Rudolph have accomplished that no other players (at least in the history of recorded music) have ever done before is absorb just about the entire range of possible musics and have them come out, through Sosa's piano playing and Rudolph's various percussion instruments, sounding perfectly natural, as if there's no distance between what they want to say musically and the forms of expression used to convey that musical content. For Sosa and Rudolph, it's all become one thing--the emotional content of the music and its formal expression. It's like they've found a way to make music a vehicle for a pure emotional link between performers and hearers. Yes, what comes out of Sosa's piano and Rudolph's percussion is beautiful beyond imagining, but more importantly what they play becomes the means for a direct connection between their souls and the listeners'.

I have been moved by this music in a way that no other music has ever moved me. There's a whole ocean of feeling in it--pathos, tragedy, joy, sorrow, struggle, elation, triumph, celebration, love, compassion, passion, hurt, healing, melancholy, ceremony, and friendship. I feel like weeping, laughing, exulting, and--I say this as a devout Christian--almost worshiping when I hear this music, a feeling akin to what C.S. Lewis said when he encountered the Delphic Oracle: "It was almost by believing in the gods that I came to believe in God."

Let's be clear about one thing: this is about as far removed from New Age music as could be, though, as it exhibits superficial resemblence to such, to the uninformed, uncritical listener it may be mistaken for it. In fact, it arises from entirely different motives and sources. In a sense, this music isn't "new" at all. It's centuries, millennia, old. It bespeaks the collected wisdom of the ages. It has nothing whatever to do with facile appropriation, easy evocation, and unseemly cultural carpetbagging, all traits of New Age music. Moreover, it is absolutely without irony, thus distancing itself both from Modernism and Postmodernism. It is only new in that no other performers have ever so completely and utterly mastered so many different modes of musical expression and made them entirely their own. Some great musical geniuses have totally mastered a few or several modes of musical expression, but never ALL. Yet that is what Sosa and Rudolph have done.

Another way to put it is that they've solved the form/content dilemma.

Though I'm a little reluctant to try to describe what this music sounds like, readers deserve at least of hint. First of all, Sosa's playing exhibits perhaps a greater variety of influences than any other pianist in history, everything from Chopin to Webern to Ellington to Monk to McCoy Tyner to Ornette Coleman to Steve Lacy to Yoruban and Santerian religious ceremonial music to Black Christian Church music to Randy Weston to South American folk music to flamenco to Ruben Gonzalez to Emiliano Salvador to Edward Simon to Egberto Gismonti to John Wolf Brennan to Australian Aboriginal music to North and South American Indian music to John Cage to Philip Glass to Steve Reich to Peter Garland to William Winant to Aki Takahashi to Harold Budd and beyond. Intensely anti-virtuoso, the music instead operates on a plane beyond virtuosity, a musical region where technique is totally subsumed under the aegis of pure emotional expression. Thus, although it might be interesting to trace the musical referent(s) of any piece, it would be pointless because the power of presentation simply overwhelms such considerations. Some of the pieces sound almost impossibly simple, even naive. But do not be deceived! Even the simplest ones, such as "Sweet Summer" or "Eye of the Blackbird" or just about any number on the disc, are in reality so simple sounding because they are operating on such an elevated, pure musical level. To make music this simple and this beautiful, this emotionally charged, this gloriously, breathtakingly rendered, is possible only through consummate mastery of all technical elements and by means of a breakthrough into some ur-musical destination accessible only to those of highest accomplishment.

Secondly, Rudolph has been on a decades-long musical excursion-pilgrimage himself. Co-founder of the Mandingo Griot Society in 1977, perhaps the first expression of what was later to be called "World Music," he became associated with Yusef Lateef in 1988, an association that continues to this day. He has recorded several records with Lateef, including such masterpieces as Beyond the Sky and In the Garden, featuring his current group, the Go: Organic Orchestra, made up of more than twenty wind and percussion players. The serendipitous coming together of two hugely eclectic musical masters, each treading separate but in many senses parallel paths, has produced a recording whose virtues so far exceed the sum of its musical parts that one can only conclude that this meeting was staged by divine appointment.

In sum, after living with and listening to this transcendent music for scores of hours, I am convinced that it is the greatest musical achievement ever put to record. And since it covers such a wide range of musical territory, save, perhaps German polka and speed metal, almost any listener, no matter what his or her preferences, should be able to connect with it. By all means, DO NOT MISS OUT ON THIS ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS DISC.

I just wanted to say what a beautiful review Jan did on this album. I have to admit I haven't heard it yet but I own several of Omar Sosa'a albums and I've seen him perform several times and Jan did a wonderful job of describing his music. Not that his albums sound the same because they don't. What Jan did though was get to the essence of Omar's skills and talent. The reason I'm here is that I just bought his newest release Across the Divide and was so moved by it that I realised I wanted another album by him. So I started looking at what was still in print through Amazon so I read this review and now I think I'll buy a copy.
Good job Jan and God Bless.