Omar Sosa was born April 10, 1965, in Camagüey, Cuba. He began studying percussion and marimba at the city's music conservatory as a boy, later training formally at the Escuela Nacional de Música in Havana and completing his education at the Instituto Superior de Arte, Cuba's top-tier conservatory system for classical and Afro-Cuban musicianship alike. Piano came later, picked up as a teenager and pursued with the same rigor as his percussion training — a dual grounding in rhythm and harmony that would define his entire approach to the keyboard. Before he left Cuba, he taught percussion to children and, in 1986, formed the group Tributo, through which he recorded and toured for several years, building the reputation that would eventually carry him off the island.

The 1990s scattered him across three continents. In 1993 he moved to Quito, Ecuador, and immersed himself in the Afro-Ecuadorian folkloric traditions of Esmeraldas province — the marimba-driven music of a Black Pacific-coast community whose drum-and-marimba language shares deep roots with the Afro-Cuban rhythms Sosa already knew, but voices them differently. That encounter shows up directly on his early records: Bembón (Roots III) (2000) was recorded in Quito and pulls Esmeraldas musicians, including marimba master Papá Roncón, directly into the session. From Ecuador he spent time in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, before relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1995 — the move that put him in front of American audiences and, eventually, a Grammy voting body. San Francisco is where Sosa's recording career actually started: his solo piano debut, Omar Omar, came out in 1996 on Otá Records, the Oakland-based label he built as the vehicle for his own catalog and has used for the bulk of his output ever since, name-checked in nearly every catalog number below. He would later resettle again, this time in Barcelona, Spain, where he is based today — a life shaped as much by displacement and reassembly as by any single national tradition, which is more or less the subject of his music.

Sosa's discography is enormous and moves in overlapping cycles rather than a single linear arc. The Otá years of the late 1990s and early 2000s — Free Roots (1997), Inside (recorded December 1998, released 1999), Spirit of the Roots (1999), Bembón (2000), Prietos (2001), Sentir (2002), A New Life (2003), Mulatos (2004) — established the core vocabulary: Yoruba-derived ritual rhythm, Ecuadorian and West African percussion, jazz harmony borrowed from Monk and Herbie Hancock, and Sosa's own restless use of piano, marimba, and Fender Rhodes inside the same tune. Sentir (2002) brought his first Grammy and Latin Grammy nominations for Best Latin Jazz Album; Mulatos (2004), featuring Cuban clarinet giant Paquito D'Rivera alongside Tunisian oud player Dhafer Youssef and German drummer Steve Argüelles, earned a second Grammy nomination and pushed the pan-African premise further outward, toward North Africa and the Middle East.

The mid-2000s brought Sosa's first sustained large-ensemble work: Promise (2007), recorded live at NDR's Hamburg studio with guest trumpeter Paolo Fresu, and then Ceremony (2010), his first full studio collaboration with Germany's NDR Bigband and Brazilian cellist-arranger Jaques Morelenbaum, reworking material from across his catalog for an 18-piece horn section. Ceremony won the ECHO Jazz Award for Big Band Album of the Year in 2011 (and, separately, the 10th Independent Music Award for Jazz Album) — enough of a success that Sosa and the NDR Bigband returned for a second collaboration, es:sensual, in 2016. Between the two NDR records came Across the Divide: A Tale of Rhythm & Ancestry (2009), billed to the Omar Sosa Sextet and drawing a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary World Music Album alongside a Latin Grammy nomination the same year — one of his most decorated single releases.

Sosa has also built an entire parallel career as a duo player, pairing his piano against a rotating cast of specific instrumental voices rather than a fixed band. With Sardinian trumpeter Paolo Fresu he built a trilogy across more than a decade — Alma (2012), Eros (2016), and Food (2023) — each one adding new collaborators (cellist Jaques Morelenbaum throughout, singer Natacha Atlas on Eros, rapper Kokayi and steel-pan player Andy Narell on Food) without losing the core two-horn-and-piano intimacy. With Senegalese kora player Seckou Keita he made two records exploring the historical link between West African and Cuban music, Transparent Water (2017) and Suba (2021), the latter recorded largely during pandemic lockdown and released on the Welsh world-music label Bendigedig. With Swiss-Venezuelan violinist Yilian Cañizares he made Aguas (2018), and in 2022 he paired two concert grand pianos with fellow Cuban Marialy Pacheco for the live duo album Manos. Even his most straightforwardly solo work has range: Inside (1999) and Senses – Solo Piano (2014) are unaccompanied piano records fifteen years apart, bookending a catalog that otherwise rarely sits still.

The album most explicitly built around a jazz-history reference point is Eggun: The Afri-Lectric Experience (2013), an electro-acoustic reworking of Miles Davis's music filtered through pop, soul, and R&B textures inside a Latin jazz frame — Lionel Loueke's guitar and Pedrito Martinez's percussion sit alongside Sosa's own electronics and vocals. It earned him another Grammy nomination for Best Latin Jazz Album. An East African Journey (2021) turned his pan-African interest specifically toward East Africa, a region less represented in his earlier catalog than West Africa or the Caribbean.

In 2022, filmmaker Søren Sørensen released Omar Sosa's 88 Well-Tuned Drums, a feature documentary tracing Sosa's life and process that went on to win roughly twenty festival awards, including prizes for best art-and-music documentary; a companion LP of the same name, remastered and pressed in a limited edition of 750 copies, followed as a Record Store Day release in 2024. Sosa has received seven Grammy and Latin Grammy nominations across his career, plus two BBC Radio 3 Award for World Music nominations in the "Americas" category (2004 and 2006, both years alongside Ibrahim Ferrer and Caetano Veloso), without a Grammy win to date — a career built, by his own accounting, on breadth of collaboration rather than a single signature sound.

Sosa names a genuinely wide net of influences: traditional Afro-Cuban ritual and folkloric music, European classical composers including Chopin, Bartók, and Satie, and a jazz lineage running through Monk, Coltrane, Parker, Oscar Peterson, Herbie Hancock, and Chick Corea, alongside Cuban forebears Chucho Valdés and the pioneering group Irakere. He has also cited Keith Jarrett as a pianistic touchstone — Jarrett's own career, including his solo-concert improvisations and the Standards Trio, is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile — though the two have never recorded together; the connection is stylistic, not collaborative. What sets Sosa apart from most players working this same list of names is how literally he treats "fusion": rather than blending traditions into a single hybrid sound, his records tend to juxtapose specific, identifiable voices — a kora, a marimba tradition from one particular Ecuadorian province, a cello, a Fender Rhodes — and let them argue with each other inside the same arrangement. His piano touch is percussive first, melodic second, a direct inheritance of his early training on marimba and hand percussion before he ever sat at a keyboard, and he treats electronics (samplers, effects, programmed textures) as just another color in that same toolkit rather than a separate, opposed idiom. The result is a catalog that resists a single genre label more successfully than most: Afro-Cuban jazz is the closest shorthand, but individual records reach into West and East African folkloric music, contemporary classical string writing, hip-hop-adjacent spoken word, and electro-acoustic production without ever fully leaving the piano-trio-and-percussion core he started with.