JANE BUNNETT & MAQUEQUE at Hugh’s Room (2261 Dundas West), Friday-Saturday (October 14-15), 8:30 pm. $32, adv $28. hughsroom.com. See listing.
Since falling in love with Cuban music on a trip to Santiago de Cuba in the early 80s, Jane Bunnett has been forming cultural bridges between Havana and her lifelong home of Toronto.
The soprano saxophonist/flautist has cut through red tape and poured countless hours into visa applications to introduce Cuban artists to Canada, the U.S. and beyond.
With help from her husband, trumpeter Larry Cramer, she has organized trailblazing shows like 1991’s Spirits Of Havana at Harbourfront Centre featuring the late, great Merceditas Valdés. This year she is marking the 25th anniversary of her Spirits Of Havana album – which predated the Buena Vista Social Club by four years – with a deluxe edition.
A five-time Juno winner, two-time Grammy nominee and Officer of the Order of Canada, Bunnett has turned her attention to a new project. Jane Bunnett & Maqueque is an Afro-Cuban jazz sextet featuring five young Cuban women: drummer Yissy Garcia, pianist Dánae Olano, percussionist Magdelys Savigne, violinist Elizabeth Rodriguez, bassist Celia Jimenez – plus frequent guests Melvis Santa and Daymé Arocena.
Most of the group is based in Cuba so they live and rehearse in Bunnett’s Parkdale home when everyone is in town. This weekend, they launch their second album, Oddara, at Hugh’s Room.
What’s it like being in an intergenerational band? Do you feel a bit like a mom sometimes?
I do the whole gamut. Sometimes I feel big-sisterish, sometimes I feel I’m going to be a parent and say, “No, this isn’t a good idea,” and sometimes I feel teenagerish around them cuz their energy is infectious. They’re all hyper-alpha females, high-strung and energetic. It picks me up.
Why was it important to make the band all women?
For 30 years we’ve led The Spirits Of Havana, and I felt like there weren’t enough opportunities for women down there. I would be in the conservatories and see so many of them not performing. If there was a chance for them to get up and play, they wouldn’t do it. [They were] really intimidated, not encouraged. There aren’t a lot of performance opportunities for musicians in Cuba, period. So the guys certainly are not encouraging their girlfriends and wives to get out there.
How does Oddara compare with Maqueque’s debut?
The first record was a real leap of faith. The plan was to rehearse for five days and then go into the studio, and that’s what we did. Daymé’s father managed a club off the beaten track called the Las Vegas, a club for drag queens. We’d go in there in the daytime, and sometimes the electricity would be off and we’d be sitting in total darkness. We went into four different studios. In the first one, the piano ended up breaking. The bass player borrowed a bass, and it was broken. And then the record ended up getting a Juno! It blew my mind. I started to have more faith in the project.
We sent it to jazz fests, toured Canada and did a few dates in the States. We really got to know each other while rehearsing in the house. For the first record, Daymé and I did most of the writing now everybody is writing tunes.
You helped set the stage for Cuban music in Toronto in the early 90s. How is the scene faring now?
There’s such a love for Cuban music because it’s danceable, joyful, fun and sophisticated. It’s so tied to jazz, to North American music, to pop music – to everything. And now so many Cubans are living in Toronto. They say there are more Cubans here than in the Bronx, because if you go to Cuba now people want to come to Canada. They know Canada and they really know Toronto.
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