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1. SUBAOmar Sosa & Seckou KeitaSleeve notes by Andy Morgan——————————————————————————————————It begins with water. An avenue of gold appearsquite suddenly on the still waters of the sea, stretching off to an unknown horizon. Thesun performs its daily resurrection, its ceremony of hope. A new life emerges from the waterywomb and cries. Water is splashed on faces and hands at the start of a Santería ceremony, cleansing the soul, beckoning the spirits, the ancestors, the supreme force. An old ship ploughs a furrow through cold Atlantic waters, transporting the ancestors under the maternal eye of Yemayá, Yoruban goddess of seas and lakes. The warm waters of the Mediterranean lap the shoreline,no more than thirty paces from the house on the south-easterntip of Menorca where Omar Sosa was joined by Seckou Keita and his kids in the summer of 2020, during a rare window of ease and freedom between two periods of lockdown. Even though Omar reveres water, calling it “the blood of the earth,” he doesn’t like swimming. “We Cubans relate towater in a different way,” he says, “fishes and stuff like that. But we don’t get in.” No matter. Seckou and his kids were splash happy. The time felt like a sudden release from the strange imprisonment of the pandemic. The sun and warmth were generous, as was the food. Seckou made his usual Senegalese dishes: thieband mafféwith rice, chicken and fish. Omar prepared his simple combinations of rice and beans, and yucca.Apart from the swimming, the sunbathing, and thefood, their main purpose was to prepare a new album. Having his kids around was a blessing for Seckou. Their presence created an unfamiliar but welcome working atmosphere. The frenzy of Seckouand Omar’s musical lives, the helter-skelter of tours, sessions, projects, had been brought to a juddering halt by a microscopic virus. The downsides were brutal, but there was asilver lining: the sudden calm, the silence, the chance to breathe, to look afresh, to imagine a 
2. new future. Seckou calls the pandemic “a top-level university of seeing the world in a different way.” That freakish, dawning spirit had to be bottled somehow. Seven years before, Omar and Seckouhad recorded their highly praised debut Transparent Water. Seckou called Omar duringlockdown and said, “my man! You think we could do a second one?” Omar was ready. During one conversation, Seckou mentioned the word SUBA, which means ‘sunrise’ in Mandinka, his native language. “Let’s go for that, bro,” Omar said without hesitation. “It wasn’t because of Covid that we thought about SUBA,” Seckou says. “It was SUBAfor many things: music, art, human beings, compassion, change.” Sunrise is Seckou’sfavourite time of day, a time of freshness and hope. “Even if you’re facing certain difficulties, you reset your brain back to normal. You see that sunrise as a new day, a new peace, a new something, good or bad. An exciting something. That was the feeling I had when I was writing.”For Omar, the albumis a heartfelt reiteration of humanity’s oldest prayer: “The concept of the record is peace, hope and unity. In this moment we’re living, when everything’s falling apart little by little, the lastthing we have inside ourselves is asacredconnection with our inner voice, with our spiritand light and with our ancestors. We try to give hope through music andtell people that we can be together.”Mostof the core material was written in isolation, then brought like so many raw ingredients -rice, cabbage, fish, onion, habanero peppers, okra -to Menorca to make one big platter of music.Thekindof dish that people will gather around at supper time in Seckou’s homeland of Casamance in southern Senegal, scooping up the richly spicedfare with their hands, partaking in the equitable distribution that a communal dish -that paradigm of old-time African sharing -imposes. In August2020, the two musiciansreconvened at the Fattoria Musica near Osnabrück in Germany and, after ten days-with the help of Venezuelan percussionist Gustavo Ovalles (whorevealed himself to be best cook of them all, graciously blending the tastes of his two musical partners into delicious, unified dishes),as well as Omar’s regular sound man Stephan van Wylick-the 
3. dish was ready. Beans and rice. Melody and rhythm. Piano and kora. Generous music, simpleyet quietly subtle, the kind that’s easy on the palate, with ingredients sourced from Cuba, West Africa, Venezuela, Brazil (in the form of Jaques Morelenbaum’s cello) and Burkina Faso (the flute of Dramane Dembélé). Two core principles guided the enterprise: less is more (or minimalismo as Omar likes to call it) and collaboration. Real collaboration. Not the exploratoryconversationof two virtuosi getting to know each other which was Transparent Water, but the kind of teamwork that only the lived experience of performing over 85gigs together across the globe affords. “The project is Africa,” says Omar, “done our way. We present our own traditions, but we always respect and listen to each other, with a lot of humility. No one is the boss. The boss is the music. The boss is the message.”Seckou refers to Omar as MrMoment. Hit the first note and see what happens. Play and find out what the spirits have to say. That approachwas seductively liberating when the pair first met back in 2012, but this time round, the introduction of lyrics, mostly sung in the two dominant languages of Senegal, -Wolof and Mandinka-imposeda new discipline. The feeling always came first, but it was followed by structure, arrangements, charts pinned to the walls of the house in Menorca that mapped the harmonicchanges, the bridges and codas of each song.And less is more: if there’s a motto that sums up the pandemic’s silver lining, that’s the one. “I’m ata point in my life when doing crazy solos has made me...Idon’t want to say unhappy...butclose to unhappy,” Omar says. “Because for me, music has to be a conversation. Be humble. Breathe. Make space. I think the world needs gentle and beautiful, not arrogant,music.We don’t want fast, mad playing.”The very idea of idea of two jazz virtuosos in one place, competing for complexity, tangling up riffs, detonates one of Seckou’s characteristic explosions of joyous laughter. “We tested each other on that first album, so we don’t need to prove it anymore,”he says. “We don’t want our listeners to struggle to understandus. The music we’re doing is for the whole world, any generation, age group, gender, religion. It’s more relaxing, meditative, music that’s delicate, that makes you think.”