It might be St. Patrick’s Day, but the vibe will be decidedly Cuban when Jane Bunnett & Spirits of Havana take to the stage at the Registry Theatre. The show will feature a rare performance with the area’s own Penderecki String Quartet, with whom the Toronto-based soprano saxophonist, flutist, composer and bandleader recorded 2004’s Red Dragonfly. In fact, they’ve not been on stage together since a few promotional appearances for that CD.
Bunnett expects next weekend’s concert to draw heavily on the album, a mix of “folk-type songs” from around the world, with an emphasis on Cuba.
Also featured will be tracks from her recent Cuban Rhapsody, recorded with Cuban piano master Hilario Durán, who’ll also be on stage next Saturday. That’s particularly fitting given that Bunnett is currently celebrating 30 years of making Cuban-influenced jazz. Bunnett, in fact, just returned this week from her latest trip to the Caribbean island, having stayed in the same hotel she and her husband occupied on their first visit there in 1982. It was a vacation that changed her musical destiny.
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Upon arriving in Santiago, she discovered that music was everywhere in Cuba. The hotel she stayed at – then a new enterprise in a still-developing part of the country – had an 18-piece band playing in the lounge, with the musicians three times more numerous than the number of guests – six or seven – staying there.
“It was like being hit by a lightning bolt – the music was so overwhelming,” she said of the experience. “Musicians are such an important part of the culture that it was a hugely welcoming place to be.”
Having fallen in love with the music, she set about incorporating it into the jazz that she’d already started playing. Her love of jazz dated back to the mid-1970s when, on a trip to San Francisco, she saw Charles Mingus’s band. Returning home, she was determined to play jazz. A decade later, Bunnett was making inroads with the Toronto jazz scene.
Today, the accomplished reed player is a multiple Juno Award winner and Grammy Award nominee, holder of an honourary doctorate from Queen’s University, and recipient of the Order of Canada.
Bunnett has combined elements of Cuban roots music with traditional contemporary jazz in recordings such as Radio Guantanamo, Cuban Odyssey, Alma de Santiago, Ritmo + Soul, Chamalongo, Havana Flute Summit, Jane Bunnett and The Cuban Piano Masters. Her first recording in Cuba was the Juno Award-winning Spirits of Havana.
Since that first fateful visit to Cuba, she’s returned many times, both to make music and to support young musicians through the Spirit of Music Foundation, which provides instruments for kids studying in the country’s 25 music conservatories. “Music is so important to the people, but you should see some of the instruments these kids are using – it’s a miracle they get the sounds out of them that they do,” she said, noting that the young musicians are so well versed and spend so much time practicing that they’re practically professionals by the time they reach the age of 15. That, in turn, leads to the musical vibrancy that continues to draw her back to the country two or three times a year.
The influence Cuba has had on her acclaimed music will be on full display next Saturday night. Jane Bunnett & the Spirits of Havana with The Penderecki String Quartet take to the stage Mar. 17 at 8 p.m. at the Registry Theatre, 122 Frederick St., Kitchener. Tickets are $35, available at the Centre in the Square box office by calling 578-1570 or toll free 1-800-265-8977 or online at www.centre-square.com.
