JAZZ REVIEW
Votive Candles and Wild Riffs
By BEN RATLIFF

The Cuban-born pianist Omar Sosa has a nearly feral sense of showmanship: at the Blue Note on Monday night, performing for the first time in New York, he came to flatten the crowd, and he did.

Mr. Sosa, who since leaving Cuba in 1993 has moved between Ecuador, Spain and San Francisco, knows how to make an entrance. His band members appeared one by one, beginning with the singer Martha Galarraga, who is Cuban. She started a religious praise song. She was followed by the drummer, Elliott Kavee, from New York; the bassist, Geoff Brennan, and the saxophonist, Eric Crystal, both from San Francisco; the percussionist, Gustavo Ovalles, from Venezuela; and the rapper Brutha Los, from the Oakland-based hip-hop duo Company of Prophets.

Mr. Sosa completed the spectrum, dressed in a white gown, holding a votive candle and a red satin scarf; he was wearing a collapsible white hat that looked like a Noguchi lampshade.

And as soon as he took the stage, the Afro-Cuban vamp that the band had assembled shifted into wild, aggressive, polytonal jazz; a few minutes later, the band was joined by Said Hakmoun, a Moroccan singer, who wailed improvisations in Arabic scales. It became a rowdy group, happy under the watch of Mr. Sosa's goofy, hyperanimated grin. He didn't seem concerned about showing the empirical concurrences between the rhythms and modes of different cultures; he preferred that everyone exult together.

By far the greatest joys of the evening came in rhythmic vamps and breakdowns, when Brutha Los free-styled a rap about riding with Jesus in a Cadillac or when Ms. Galarraga intoned Yoruba chants and the band just worked out. But Mr. Sosa also furnished meticulously arranged parts to open and close his tunes; they showed that he had absorbed the standard modern jazz musician's diet of Pat Metheny, Milton Nascimento and Weather Report.

He played an astonishing piano solo, drenched in floridly classical, superanimated Cuban piano technique. And he even plunged into astringent free improvisation with bass and drums, in the Cecil Taylor mode; he ultimately used it as a flavor, but not without playing it seriously for at least a minute.

A minute was about as long as Mr. Sosa could tarry in any one style. Mixed with his hippie-ish, people-of-all-stripes sensibility was a sense of impatience constantly threatening to undermine the entire project. But the set held together, and proved Mr. Sosa's charismatic large-canvas imagination.