Chamberfest to hear Bunnett and Maqueque from Cuba
Jane Bunnett brings all-female band Maqueque to Chamberfest
Just before Labour Day last year, Toronto saxophonist and flutist Jane Bunnett was making a 10-hour drive in a rental van, across Michigan to Chicago. Her passengers were five Cuban women in their 20s — basically half Bunnett’s age — the members of her band, Maqueque.
They were en route to the Chicago Jazz Festival, where they would play for thousands in Millennium Park. It would be the biggest crowd to hear Maqueque’s music to date, and Bunnett told the women to expect a lot of warmth from listeners.
She was right. On that sweltering late afternoon, the Chicagoans were completely won over, whooping for Maqueque’s high-energy music that was funky and earthy one moment and swirling with sweet vocal harmonies the next.
Bunnett’s soprano saxophone was featured, and so, too, was the park-filling voice of perpetually smiling, dancing Daymé Arocena, especially when she dug deep into the band’s Afro-Cuban remake of Ain’t No Sunshine. A prolonged standing ovation led to the band’s playing the only encore at the festival, in defiance of its strict timetable.
“I just felt like a rock star, and the girls did too,” Bunnett recalls. “I’d sure love to get a few more gigs like that Chicago gig.”
On Thursday, Bunnett plays Dominion-Chalmers United Church with Maqueque, as part of Chamberfest. The group will be joined by the Cecilia String Quartet, helping its jazz-meets-world-music sound find a footing with chamber music fans.
The church’s boomy acoustics might force Bunnett and Maqueque — which includes an explosive drummer and a percussionist — to temper their ferocity a bit. But consider this: Previously in Ottawa, the group played GigSpace Performance Studio, an intimate, 46-seat concert venue on Gladstone Avenue.
Whether the concert is massive or minuscule, Bunnett is glad that Maqueque gets to perform.
“Whenever this group does get the opportunity to play, there’s been really incredible, fantastic feedback from audiences because, I think, there’s a really joyful feeling on the stage with these women when they get to play,” she says.
“Most people are very surprised that the group is so powerful. They’re really very strong characters.”
Bunnett and her husband, trumpeter Larry Cramer, have been advocates for Cuban musicians since the late 1980s — before some of her Maqueque bandmates were born. This year marks the 25th anniversary of Bunnett’s groundbreaking Spirits of Havana project, which united North American and Cuban musicians.
“It’s very difficult for anybody to play in Cuba because you have to ask for government permission. You can’t just go to a club or something and … crack a deal. You can’t do that in Cuba,” Bunnett says. “The performing opportunities, even though there’s so much music, it’s really geared to the young people dancing in the streets. To play jazz is really, really difficult.”
A few years ago, she launched Maqueque, which means “the energy of a young girl’s spirit” in the Afro-Cuban Yoruba culture, as a response to the “macho factor” on the Cuban music scene.
“A lot of the guys’ girlfriends are musicians, and they sit on the sidelines,” she says. “After having so many guys come through Spirits of Havana, I realized I hadn’t really done anything for any of the young women I had seen in the (music) conservatories. And then they just end up quitting or marrying a musician. If they’re lucky, they teach.”
The band’s eponymous debut disc won the 2015 Juno Award for Best Jazz Album of the Year: Group — even if, for Bunnett, it was fraught with challenges.
“That record was a very trying record to make,” she says. “This project was a huge leap of faith.”
Maqueque’s members were recruited quickly before recording began, and they didn’t have a history of playing together, Bunnett says. “I was really just getting to know these girls, and they were all at various stages in their musical development.”
Before recording, the band rehearsed over five days in a drag bar in central Havana, but its electricity was intermittent and the band would be stuck at times with a powerless electric keyboard, powerless electric bass and no lights.
“We were in the dark, sitting there,” Bunnett says.
And then, when the band did record, the bass player — a classical bassoonist by training who didn’t own a bass — was playing a broken instrument. Bunnett discerned that only after the music was recorded, and later, during mixing, engineers had to beautify the bass sound considerably.
The band has a sophomore album ready, to be released in October, which Bunnett says is the work of an improved band.
“Every time you perform, it just makes you stronger,” she says. “There’s just something about putting yourself out there. There’s only so much practising you can do in a room by yourself.”
Mind you, touring with the band, which Bunnett does several times a year, has its own special hurdles.
There are visas to obtain for the Cuban residents and grants to cover travel, if possible. Fortunately, the group hasn’t encountered very much skepticism or sexism.
“I tried to get this gig at this club, and the guy turned it down because he didn’t like the way the girls looked,” Bunnett does say. “We weren’t tarty enough on the (album) cover?”
When Bunnett brings Maqueque’s members to Canada, they stay at her house, “much to my neighbours’ chagrin,” she kids.
Bunnett says of her young bandmates: “They’ve got an incredible amount of energy. Sometimes they want to drag me out to some dance place after a gig. I’ve only maybe gone once. They can kind of go until four in the morning. They go, ‘I can sleep in the car,’ or ‘I can sleep in the plane.’ But Jane can’t.”
Bunnett and the band can still summon the energy they need when they hit the bandstand.
“They’re pretty excited, pretty pumped to be playing before an audience. And that’s pretty infectious.”