Jane Bunnett Forms Exhilarating New All Female band, Maqueque, Blending Afro-Cuban, Soul and Jazz
Self-Titled Release Available September 9
via Justin Time Records
"...Bunnett integrates her flute and soprano sax into the Cubans' music,
giving us the best of the past and the contemporary." - JazzTimes
giving us the best of the past and the contemporary." - JazzTimes
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.
 |
| Jane Bunnett and Maqueque - EPK |
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 · Jane Bunnett and Maqueque
Justin Time Records · Release Date: September 9, 2014
For more information on JANE BUNNETT, please visit: JaneBunnett.com
For more information on Justin Time Records, please visit: JustinTime.com
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