Sosa, soulmates joyfully transcend musical boundaries

But he found one of his deepest soulmates in Peter Apfelbaum, a multi-instrumentalist hailing from Berkeley, Calif., who shares Sosa’s fervent love of West African musical forms.

“Peter’s a master,’’ says Sosa, 46, who performs Thursday at Scullers with his Afreecanos Quartet featuring Apfelbaum. “He’s the white guy in the band, and he’s more African than all of us, in terms of his deep spirit in the African tradition.’’

Sosa and Apfelbaum met in the mid-1990s, shortly after Sosa arrived in the Bay Area and added a bracing jolt of energy to the region’s thriving Latin music scene. In a few years he had developed an omnivorous aesthetic into which his rhapsodic jazz piano wove Moroccan chants, hip-hop exposition, Yoruba incantations and R&B crooning.

Sosa realized that Apfelbaum was a kindred spirit, but they didn’t have many opportunities to work together until several years ago, when the pianist created the Afreecanos Quartet, which takes its name from his 2008 album “Afreecanos’’ (Ota Records). While Sosa has continued to expand his stylistic reach, he has also distilled his compositional approach. Where his compositions used to unfold episodically, like a travelogue, his music now feels more integrated, while allowing each player maximum license to shape its flow at any given moment.

“The music we do is not to impress anybody, how fast or how complex we can play,’’ Sosa says. “The foundation of the music is joy. We play to enjoy every single moment. The first thing I tell Peter when I bring in the music is, ‘Do whatever you like.’ We have some forms, but the foundation of the band is freedom.’’

A product of the Berkeley public school system’s late-1960s experiment introducing music instruction and improvisation in kindergarten, Apfelbaum, 50, was weaned on musical freedom. Displaying prodigious multi-instrumental skills before he was a teenager, he soaked up an international array of sounds. By the late 1970s, he had formed the Hieroglyphics Ensemble, a sprawling, talent-laden band for which Apfelbaum composed a body of simple folk themes set to funk and reggae grooves and complex interlocking rhythms drawn from Afro-Cuban and Indian traditions.

The band gained such a formidable reputation that trumpeter Don Cherry, a seminal avant-garde musician and leading force in the development of world jazz, featured the group on his 1990 A&M album “Multikulti.’’ Based in Brooklyn, N.Y., for the past decade, Apfelbaum leads a New York version of Hieroglyphics, though in recent years he has been more visible through his work with Cuban drummer/composer Dafnis Prieto’s Si O Si Quartet and trumpeter Steven Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra.

Apfelbaum notes that when Sosa and his Cuban peers sought out jazz in the 1980s, recordings were so scarce that they passed around a Keith Jarrett cassette like samizdat. The budding Berkeley crowd didn’t face government coercion, but limited access to Cuban music created a similar situation. With few folkloric musicians in the area, they handed around a precious copy of an album by Los Muñequitos de Matanzas.

“There’s also the fact that we’re both interested in sound in general, which means implicitly you have a broad vocabulary,’’ says Apfelbaum, whose Afreecanos arsenal includes tenor, soprano and bamboo saxophones, various flutes, piano, melodica, and sundry hand percussion instruments. “Omar’s music is people’s music. It has a very folk quality, but it’s an interesting mix of simplicity and unorthodox sounds.’’

The other members of Sosa’s quartet are equally adventurous. Sosa met Childo Tomas just days after the Mozambican electric bassist moved to Barcelona in the late 1990s. Steeped in southern African grooves “he puts this thump in my music,’’ Sosa says. “The music comes from me, and he puts the stamp of Africa on it in the way I always dreamed.’’

London-based drummer Marque Gilmore, who was raised in Cambridge and is the brother of noted jazz guitarist David Gilmore, is a more recent addition to the fold. Sosa first heard the drum ’n’ bass pioneer and founding member of the Black Rock Coalition during the drummer’s tenure with Joe Zawinul, and realized his loose but metronomic beat would be an ideal anchor for his ensemble.

“We all play percussion,’’ Sosa says. “As long as everybody respects their own tradition it all fits. Marque’s got this African-American soul. I tell Childo, you don’t need to be Ron Carter or Christian McBride. You just need to be you. When everybody listens to each other and shares our own traditions, a lot of beautiful things happen.’’

Andrew Gilbert can be reached at jazzscribe@aol.com.