Everything he has is a lot. A musician practically from the day he was born in Cuba's westernmost Pínar del Río province, Díaz began formal training as a child, and completed it in Havana, where his professional career started at age 14.

During seven years of recording and touring with Irakere, Díaz perfected his outstanding five-conga technique, which later earned him a place alongside a roll-call of Cuban music's great and good – the Afro-Cuban All Stars, Rubén González, Cachaíto López, Ibrahim Ferrer, Omara Portuondo, Orishas – as well as musicians from further afield such as US jazz trumpeter Roy Hargrove and Buena Vista impresario Ry Cooder.

The key name to note in that list is bassist Cachaíto López. Díaz has described Echu Mingua as a continuation of López' album Cachaíto, and that's audibly true. Where Cachaíto (with Díaz' central participation) yanked the Cuban sound into the twenty-first century, Echu Mingua (with López' help) propels it on to a different planet with a stunning self-confidence and ambition.

Within the first couple of tracks, I was open-mouthed with amazement, and left wondering whether this was just some kind of lucky accident. By the end of the album I was stupefied into something like a trance state and the question had become redundant.

Analysis seems somehow pedantic. This album is part carnival, part Santería mass, opening and closing with an invocation and farewell to the spirits. The mood of ecstasy is sustained by delirious borrowings from the worlds of jazz, funk, hip hop, danzón, griot and Argentinian music, classical and rock, and epitomised by the album's longest track, 'A Love Supreme', a Coltrane tribute in both letter and spirit, turning jazz's most famous four-note phrase into an extended bass line and responding to it with music worthy of the task, typically combining Alice Coltrane-ish string tone-clusters with a small ensemble of batá drums, DJ effects and a choral chant to Babaluá.

I know – it all sounds possibly wilful, whimsical or incoherent. It's none of those things. One reason why is the virtuosity of Díaz, Cachaíto López, flautist Magic Malik and French DJ Dee Nasty, whose musicianship pervades the album with a powerful feeling of synthesis. Another is the long-term structure – the psychedelic outings that open and close the album are balanced by a sojourn into a relatively purer sound-world of instrumental experimentation (broadly latin jazz) in the central section. Not that there's anything conventional about these tracks either – it must be the first time anyone's played 'Round Midnight' on seven congas and a chamber string ensemble.

If you need more convincing, don’t take it from me. Take it from legendary pianists Chucho Valdés and the late Rubén González and Malian griot Baba Sissoko who all guest on the album (Echu Mingua was Rubén González' final recording). This is not one you can afford to be without.

Echi Mingua is released on World Circuit WLWCD071 on 21 March 2005.

Read an interview with Miguel 'Anga' Diaz on Fly

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Anga Diaz is playing Wychwood Festival this June in England