CONNECTING THROUGH CUBA
Toronto’s Jane Bunnett and Ottawa’s Miguel De Armas team up for the first time
Perhaps it was inevitable, given how much they have in common, that Ottawa pianist Miguel De Armas and Toronto saxophonist/ flutist Jane Bunnett would one day play a concert together.
The Cuban immigrant in his mid-50s who came to Canada five years ago and the 60-year-old Juno-winning reeds player who has championed Cuban music since the early 1990s will at last share a stage this Saturday night, at La Nouvelle Scène, presented by the TD Ottawa Winter Jazz Festival.
The two musicians met casually, three years ago, when Bunnett had De Armas over to her house in Toronto for dinner after his reputation preceded him.
“My friend, (Aylmer-based) guitarist René Gely, told me this wild Cuban pianist was living in Ottawa and he had done a few gigs with him. I was excited to meet him,” Bunnett recalls.
“We received the call that he was in town and I said, ‘Drop by our house.’ We made dinner and hung out here and ended having an impromptu jam into the wee hours. That’s when I heard how fantastic he was.”
“We talked about Cuba, its culture, its music, of course, and about not only how many people we knew but have as friends in common,” De Armas remembers. “We created a great synergy and that was a fun way of getting to know each other. By the end of the night we both realized that we should do something together in the near future.”
It’s taken the Ottawa Jazz Festival’s advocacy to unite Bunnett and De Armas. In the lead-up to this weekend’s festival, programming manager Petr Cancura put out a call to Ottawa musicians to propose first-time collaborations with out-of-town musical guests.
Cancura says he received about 30 applications. De Armas’s pitch to work with Bunnett was chosen for a plum spot during the winter festival because “it was a very well thought-out and realistic project and the match of artists is perfect,” Cancura says.
“Miguel is a serious musician and composer with a consistent band,” he continues. “Jane is a great collaborator and has worked with some of the finest musicians in the world. The match is of a high calibre and will undoubtedly be very strong.”
De Armas says Bunnett has “the sensitivity to understand and appreciate Cuban-rooted music in its fullness.
“She has developed that sense through 35 years of history, travelling to the island and getting to know in depth the richness and complexity of Afro-Cuban rhythms,” says De Armas, who studied classical percussion and piano in his homeland.
“She is the perfect complement to my work of the last four years, during which I have been composing for my quartet,” De Armas continues.
“Also, Jane is a very funny individual. I really love her sense of humour.”
Bunnett has played with a who’s who of great Cuban jazz pianists and she mentions De Armas in the same breath with them.
“He is from the school of Chucho Valdés, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Hilario Durán,” Bunnett says. “These musicians are so full of knowledge. They can play all the percussion rhythms and they also have this piano technique combined with the Romantic era of not only European music, but their own wonderful Cuban composers. They’ve got it all covered.”
Before he came to Canada, De Armas was a founding member of NG La Banda, an eclectic Cuban group that created its own style of popular, dance-oriented music called timba and toured the world playing it. He worked steadily in his homeland, playing on 50 CDs as an accompanist or in a co-operatively led group.
Bunnett, who is also an Officer of the Order of Canada, has won five Juno Awards. Her most recent Juno came for her 2015 album Jane Bunnett & Maqueque, a project that unites her with a band of young female Cuban musicians to play original music.
At La Nouvelle Scène, Bunnett will join De Armas’s working band, which will be augmented with the addition of vocalist/percussionist Amado Dedéu García.
“We will present 10 of my original compositions and two jazz standards that I have re-arranged. This high-energy music will be a great fit for Jane,” De Armas says.