For more
than thirty years, Canadian flutist and saxophonist Jane Bunnett has been
bridging the gulf between Cuba and North America, introducing jazz audiences to
some of the finest musicians that the island has to offer. Through her
longstanding ensemble Spirits of Havana, Bunnett has provided early
opportunities to such future greats as Dafnis Prieto, Yosvany Terry, Pedrito
Martínez, and David Virelles, and also becoming a Canadian national treasure as
well as an internationally acclaimed jazz artist in the process. Now, with her
new sextet Maqueque, she introduces the world to some of Cuba's most promising
female musicians, injecting her own music with an invigorating dose of youthful
energy in the process.
On their
self-titled debut, Maqueque blends scintillating Afro-Cuban rhythms, folkloric
influences, exhilarating jazz, and soulful vocals into an utterly intoxicating
blend. Vocalist Daymé Arocena, percussionist Magdelys Savigne, drummer Yissy
García, bassist and tres guitarist Yusa, pianist Danae Olano, and bassist Celia
Jimenez join the four-time JUNO Award winner, two-time Grammy® Award-nominee,
and Officer of the Order of Canada to create a dynamic and hard-driving sound that
should suffice to silent any doubts from the boys' clubs of jazz or Cuban
music.
The
band's name was provided by Arocena's grandmother, a practitioner of the
Afro-Cuban Yorùbá religion. It translates to "the spirit of a young
girl," which perfectly captures the vibe of the group and the song that
shares its name. "I imagine that's what I was like as a ten-year-old
girl," Bunnett says. "I was very energetic, I could be sweet and I
could be feisty. That's Maqueque."
Over her
decades of visits to Cuba, Bunnett observed that almost 75% of the students in
the country's many conservatories were female, but the jam sessions that she
attended at night would be almost exclusively male. "When they finish all
their training, you don't see them out on the scene," Bunnett says.
"At jam sessions, I would notice some of the young girls I had seen at the
schools just sitting on the sidelines, happy to watch their boyfriends up there
playing. It seemed really strange."
She
didn't set out to form an all-female band, but the seeds were planted when
Bunnett and her husband, trumpeter Larry Cramer, met Arocena during a trip to
Havana with Toronto radio station JAZZ.FM91's Jazz Safari program. "I
organized a private jam session in the hotel for the Safari folks and invited a
few of the Cuban artists from the jazz festival to come and play with me,"
Bunnett recalls. "I met Daymé in the lobby and she said she was a singer,
so I asked her to come. She jumped in and her vocal ability was way beyond her
years. She has this very old-soul voice for this young person. It's really
unusual and very powerful."
That
voice stuck in Bunnett's mind. A few months later, she was asked to serve as
artistic director for "Funny Girls and Dynamic Divas," an annual
fundraising event for Sistering, a Toronto-based social service agency for
women. She brought Arocena to Toronto to perform for the occasion and the
singer, Bunnett says, "brought the house down."
The
response that day planted the seed for Maqueque. Bunnett and Cramer joined
Arocena in Cuba to scout for talent, and ended up with the group of women who
now make up the sextet, most of them in the early 20s and in the earliest
stages of what promise to be fruitful careers. Yusa is slightly older and is an
in-demand player in both Cuba and Argentina, while García, only in her mid-20s,
is already a well-known figure in the Cuban music scene and has worked with
such renowned artists as David Sanborn, Omara Portuondo, Horacio "El
Negro" Hernandez, Giovanni Hidalgo, and Roy Hargrove.
The
all-female line-up provides the band with a unique energy, Bunnett says.
"There's a very happy energy about it," she describes. "All of
the women are very supportive of each other.
I've seen a couple of all-women groups in Cuba that are geared toward
tourists and can border on being pretty cheesy. What we're doing is creative
and collaborative and involves a lot of the Afro-Cuban elements that stem out
of traditional folkloric music."
The
tempestuous "Tormenta" was inspired by an experience that Bunnett had
while playing a jazz festival in Kansas, watching a tornado on the flat Midwestern
horizon as she played on an aluminum stage. "New Angel" stems from a
more joyous place, with a celebratory, joyful chorus of voices. "Song for
Haiti," originally written for a benefit album for the country's
earthquake victims, closes the album with a host of special guests, including
Spirits of Havana alum Hilario Durán (who contributes string arrangements
throughout the album) on piano, the New Orleans-style Heavyweights Brass Band,
and spoken word artist Telmary Diaz.
Arocena
also contributes three pieces: "Guajira," inspired by the
self-sufficiency of rural Cuban farmers; "Canto a Babba," an homage
to the Yorùbán deity Oba; and "De la Habana de Canada," a cha cha
relating her unusual journey. The album also includes a moving, intimately
soulful rendition of Bill Withers' classic "Ain't No Sunshine" sung
by Arocena and Yusa, and an eccentrically grooving take on 1940s Cuban pianist
Pedro Peruchin's "Mamey Colorao."
Bunnett
wrote most of the music for the album in the central Ontario cabin built by her
grandfather, a refuge surrounded by the sights and sounds of nature. Those
elements directly influenced the disc's opening track, "Papineau,"
named for a nearby waterfall. But the music was work-shopped by the group in Cuba,
adding a lively Cuban chant far removed from water crashing on rocks in the
Great White North.
That
sort of collaboration is what excites Bunnett about the music and has kept her
returning to Cuba for so many years. "One of the things that I really love
about music is to collaborate with the different personalities who are out
there, because everybody can always bring something very different to the
table. In Cuba, there's so much music happening and a lot of the time it's of a
collaborative nature; I always imagine it's like 52nd Street in its
heyday," she explains. "When I go there I feel that I'm surrounded by
a lot of creative energy. There's an enthusiasm about embracing the arts, and
music is primary to everybody's lives there, even people who aren't musicians.
Upcoming
Jane Bunnett Performances:
August 3
/ Jazz and Blues Fest / Erie, PA
August
10 / Litchfield Jazz Fest / Goshen Fairgrounds, CT
August
17 / Markham Jazz Festival / Markham, Ontario
September
11 / Scullers Jazz Club / Boston, MA
September
12 / The Side Door / Old Lyme, CT
September
14 / Lake George Jazz Festival / Shepard Park, NY
September
15 - 17 / Friends University / Wichita, KS
September
19 / Mount Vernon Country Club / Golden, CO
September
20 / The Blue Note Jazz Club / New York, NY
Jane Bunnett and Maqueque will be released on Justin
Time Records on September
9, 2014
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