Shawn Conner gives five reasons to check out double bill of Cuban music

1. The best of Cuban music.

The concert features not one but two world-class Cuban artists. The Guardian has called Daymé Arocena “Cuba’s finest young female singer.” The same newspaper said that Roberto Fonseca “is the most exciting pianist in Cuba.”

2. Buena Vista Social Club.

Fonseca, above, first came to North American attention as Rubén González’s replacement in the Buena Vista Social Club. He has also worked with BVSC founding members Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo.

3. Juno Award.

In 2015, Arocena shared a Juno for Jazz Group Album of the Year category for her participation in Toronto musician Jane Bunnett’s Afro-Cuban band Maqueque. Reviewing a live performance of the group for the Ottawa Citizen in 2016, Peter Hum wrote: “Bunnett’s soprano saxophone was featured, but so too was the park-filling voice of perpetually smiling, dancing Daymé Arocena, especially when she dug deep into the band’s AfroCuban remake of Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone.”

4. Zamazu.

Not to be outdone, Fonseca is also a gifted performer. In a review of Fonseca’s 2007 album Zamazu, the BBC noted that “Onstage, he’s an intense and charismatic figure, scatting as he kneads and pummels the keys in a muscular, percussive style that hints at his formative years as a drummer.”

5. Collaboration.

Look for the two to perform together as well as on their own. Arocena sang on Fonseca’s recent album, ABUC (“an astonishingly broad, tightly fused and incandescently delivered vision” according to, yes, the Guardian).