MANOS (Live)

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Marialy Pacheco was born in Havana in 1983 and grew up around classical Cuban piano music. She branched out into jazz as a teenager and has since been building a great reputation, both as a soloist and as the head of her trio. A highly skilled musician, her lyrical music mixes the fundamentals of perfectly mastered jazz with a rhythmic baroque sound that she inherited from the popular music traditions in her native Cuba. She made her public debut in 2017 when she released her album Duets, which, as the name suggests, offered a series of duets with some prestigious musicians and friends (among them, Hamilton de Holanda, Miguel Zenon, Rhani Krija and, of course, Omar Sosa). Now Marialy Pacheco is back with a live album recorded in the summer of 2018 that features the same minimalistic configuration. This time, she’s in the exclusive company of Afro-Cuban jazz piano legend, Omar Sosa. From the first bars of the opening track, their natural complicity is obvious, both in terms of their references as well as in their playing (fluidity of phrasing, harmonic precocity, sense of rhythm, taste in melody and vocality). The two pianists jump over all the pitfalls associated with this type of musical dialogue (the piano melody can often become little more than mindless chatter…) and offer us an authentic discourse of great linguistic and imaginative coherence. They constantly exchange their place and prerogative during the composition, letting ideas and sentences pass freely from one piano to the other; the music is full of statements, digressions and improvisations that never fail to surprise. Omar Sosa and Marialy Pacheco have created music that’s melancholic yet celebratory, unrestrained yet clearly articulated... and it’s brought to life with intoxicating rhythms and incredible melodic clarity. © Stéphane Ollivier/Qobuz