ABOUT

9PM & 10:30PM

Cover $25 at the door

Xiomara Laugart has lived and worked in New York City for two decades. As a vocalist, she has performed Cuban nueva trova, jazz standards, and Broadway numbers on local and international stages. Xiomara has recorded over 17 albums and has collaborated with Kip Hanrahan,

Xiomara joins Axel Tosca’s band tonight as they combine the beloved Cuban sounds of home from the 1950s to today.

Cuban-born pianist Axel Tosca is a dynamic performer known for his genre-bending mix of Jazz, Latin, and Timba music. Born in Cuba in 1983, Tosca grew up in a prestigious musical family. His mother is renowned Trova singer Xiomara Laugart and his father, folk singer-guitarist Alberto Tosca. Introduced to guitar at age four, Tosca was also playing piano by age seven and soon joined his parents on-stage playing his first show at Casa de las Americas. Along with performing with his parents, he attended music school. One of his teachers was Miriam Valdez, the daughter of Cuban piano legends Bebo Valdez and sister of Chucho Valdez. With this first-class education, it enabled him to gain a wide range of experiences playing with groups like Dennis & Swing, the Afro-Cuban All-Stars, Bobby Carcases, Teresa Garcia Caturla, Jose Miguel Crego, and more. Along with classical music, jazz, and Latin traditions, he also discovered hip-hop and played with The Roots when they toured Cuba. While in Cuba Tosca not only played with these legends but had won multiple piano competitions before moving to the United States in 2005 as part of the Havana Nights revue that played for two years at the world-famous Stardust Casino and Resort, in Las Vegas. His education did not stop there and he soon enrolled in jazz at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. Now based in New York, he has earned plaudits playing in clubs as a solo artist as well as with (U)nity, a richly cross-pollinated jazz band in which he is a founding member.

Currently, Tosca has worked with George Clinton, BeBe Winans, The Clark Sisters, DJ / Producer / Remixer’s Louie Vega and David Morales, Stretch & Bobbito, Mae-Sun, Steve Gadd, Ray Chew, Lenny White, Pino Palladino, Giovanni Hidalgo, Jocelyn Brown, Karren Wheeler, Monique Bingham, Godwin Lewis and J Balvin and Bad Bunny. 

Tosca was influenced by a wide range of musical experiences growing up in Cuba. There is no limit for this visionary pianist.