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Jane Bunnett
The Spirit of Havana
Canadian Jane Bunnett is a leader of the band Spirit of
Havana, which also now the name of a film shown in theatres and on Canadian
TV.
From the film's Program Notes:
Set on location in Cuba, this documentary follows Toronto
flutist and soprano saxophonist Jane Bunnett (considered one of Toronto's
premiere jazz musicians) and her husband and musical partner, trumpeter
Larry Cramer, as they travel across Cuba on a cross-cultural musical tour of
the island that showcases the musical diversity of Cuba's rich musical
legacy. Bunnett and Cramer move from location to location, each stop is
centred around recording music with different musicians at the different
spots and a CD and DVD of the material will be released will be released
early next year
- Bunnett first visited Cuba in 1984 (for a cheap vacation)
and were immediately struck by the extraordinary diversity and vibrancy of
the Cuban musical scene
- Bunnett has made nearly 50 trips to Cuba
- since that first visit, Bunnett has been a champion of Cuban music and
musicians, making regular visits ever since, playing with musicians there
and recording music and supplying and repairing instruments for school music
programs and mostly learning about the various Cuban musical traditions
- she was so attracted to Cuba because of the quality of the musicians she
encountered there and also because of the wealth of the country's traditions
which, ironically, have been shielded by its isolation from pop influences
- in an interview in The New York Times on March 5, 1998, Bunnett
says that what makes so much Cuban music so notable is the curious aspect of
Cuban jazz being largely frozen in time and cut off from a lot of what has
happened in jazz in the sixties and seventies
- she's been so linked to Cuba that some reviewers have dubbed her
"Havana Jane"
- article after article begins by saying that long before Ry Cooder made The
Buena Vista Social Club a household name, Bunnett was sharing her
passion for Latin music with North American audiences, taking Cuban artists
on tour and featuring them on acclaimed albums of her own and often putting
up Cuban musicians at her home for weeks at a time
- since 1992 "Spirits of Havana" CD, Bunnett has brought more than
40 Cuban musicians on tour with her in Canada and the U.S. and she
frequently performs with contemporary groups from all over Cuba
- says Bunnett in an interview last June, 2000: "If one more person
asks me what I think of Ry Cooder, I'll jump out a window!" -- she goes
on to say that the reason she's fed up with the Ry Cooder question is
because she feels she's been exploring Cuban music for much longer and
suddenly it's as if Ry Cooder gets all the credit for discovering Cuban
music - recently an interviewer asked her, "So, when did you jump on
the Cuban bandwagon?" which totally infuriated her because a
bandwagon-hopper is the last thing she is - hers has been a long, serious
and passionate involvement with Cuban music that began with her first visit
and her groundbreaking record, the 1992 "Spirits of Havana" was
out of course many years before Ry Cooder's film
- Bunnett: "This isn't an exotic thing to me at all"
- she's earned the respect of some of Cuba's finest musicians but she's also
said that a lot of people in the jazz world didn't get what she was doing:
"Spirits of Havana hit a lot of people as being a truly unique
record. But in the jazz community, folks just didn't get it. People couldn't
hear the connections between that music and jazz, links that to me seemed
absolutely obvious. To an extent, people like Ry Cooder have made this music
more appealing in the States partially because they're Americans breaking
these little taboos. I'm split on the whole thing, though. It's obviously
great for the music and I'm glad that they've finally crossed those
boundaries. But it's a bit frustrating to hear those guys talking as if they
suddenly discovered Cuban music."
- Bunnett says she was struck by the richness, purity and history of the
Cuban musical scene
- the ensemble she plays with now is a conglomeration of Cuban expatriates
and Canadians
- she says that on that first visit she began haunting Havana's Santo Suarez
district, hearing as much music as she could, seeking out the living legends
who were still playing and learning and soaking up as much as she could
- From the Globe & Mail, May 18, 2001, article by Tony Monyague:
"At the time of their initial visits to Cuba, in the 1980s, it wasn't
easy for foreigners to collaborate with local musicians. The authorities
there didn't encourage cross-cultural exchanges - especially between
Westerners and practitioners of folklorico. The genre remained too closely
connected with the Afro-Cuban religion of Santeria, permitted but not yet
officially sanctioned on the island. 'The music was still marginalized and
its players weren't given much respect,' recalls Bunnett, interviewed
recently in an apartment in Old Havana. 'When we made our first album here, Spirits
of Havana, some of the people we brought into the studio weren't even
recognized by the authorities as being musicians - and without that status
they couldn't record with us. It was a major bureaucratic nightmare to have
them accepted and get the recording done.' Adds Cramer: 'Three years of
work.'"
- she returned to Cuba many times, worked with and became friends with
various musicians there and travelled all over Cuba, studying the stylistic
differences of different parts of the island and familiarizing herself with
Cuban folkloric music,
classical forms and Santeria chants
- Bunnett received a Canada Council grant to return to Cuba in 1991 and
record with some of Cuba's foremost musicians and out of this came the album
Spirits of Havana, recorded at Egrem studios in Havana in 1991, the
CD came out in 1992 in which Bunnett showcases the Cuban musicians she
admires so much
- Spirits of Havana was picked by the All-Music Guide as one of the
top 300 jazz
discs of all time
- the CD features deceased singer Merceditas Valdes (who is shown in the
film Spirits of Havana singing with Bunnett in Toronto - Bunnett and
Valdes developed a close relationship and in the film Bunnett is also seen
visiting her grave - Valdes died in 1996) and also features musicians
Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Guillermo Barreto
- the CD Spirits of Havana was followed in 1994 by two traditional
jazz recordings (The Water is Wide in 1994 with Don Pullen and Double
Time with Paul Bley in 1994
- in 1995 and 1996 she put out two recordings Rendez-Vous Brazil/Cuba
in 1995 and Jane Bunnett and the Cuban Piano Masters (both recorded
in Toronto) in 1996 in which Bunnett explored her affinity for Cuban music
further
- in 1997 she returned to Cuba to record Havana Flute Summit and Chamalongo,
recorded with her Spirits of Havana band, focuses on Afro-Cuban traditions
(Bunnett received a Juno for it)
- a recent CD is Ritmo + Soul (2000) (and some reviewers have said
that Bunnett has the 'ritmo' or rhythm of Cuba in her soul), recorded in
Toronto; it's the first recording in which Bunnett fuses contemporary jazz,
traditional Cuban dance and African-American spirituals and is her sixth CD
to put Cuban musicians in the spotlight
- Ritmo + Soul has been well received
- Bunnett has said about Ritmo + Soul that she feels she is now able
to successfully
blend her interest in Cuban music with her jazz; she says that for the
longest time, she felt she had "two parallel musics happening: one was
more of a folkloric thing and the other was a jazz thing. And now I feel
like the two are coming together, which ultimately I hoped would happen. But
I didn't want to do it in a contrived way. I wanted to wait for the time
when it just sort of happened. It really seemed like a natural evolution of
the experiences of slugging away at both musics for 15 years."
- reviewers also point to the fact that it would be natural for Bunnett to
take the lead and relegate the Cuban musicians she plays with to the
background but that is the complete opposite of what she does; Bunnett
repeatedly goes in the other direction, putting the spotlight on the music
itself
- in an interview she gave in 1998 when her CD Chamalongo came out,
she describes her process as (and what she's saying would apply just as well
to the film) "basically this record is the listener sitting in amongst
us all hanging out one night. The guys are playing and we gradually enter
into the conversation when the moment takes us. It's a very organic way of
working. Some people have criticized me for that, as if I'm assuming that
I'm one of these musicians. I'm not, but I like to think that after so many
trips down there I've developed some real relationships with these
musicians. People will criticize regardless. I've learned that if you're
going to do anything interesting, you can't
pay any attention to that."
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