Jane Bunnett

Even before Dizzy Gillespie teamed up with his Cuban colleague Chano Pozo, jazz musicians have been drawn to what Jellyroll Morton called “The Spanish Tinge.” We listeners have followed suit over the years, snapping up latin-themed albums by everyone from Gillespie to Stan Kenton to the Buena Vista Social Club.

Then why does it come as a surprise that a recent champion of the music of that Caribbean island nation is a female Canadian sax and flute player? Jane Bunnett is that person and the music couldn’t be in better hands.

In a phone interview Bunnett described a film project which she and husband Larry Cramer completed to illustrate the music’s attraction saying, “We just finished a documentary film called “Spirits of Havana.” It’s kind of a road trip where we collaborated with musicians all across Cuba. The diversity of the music we encountered was just unbelievable. There’s so many styles because there’s so many influences.”

No latecomer to the Cuban music bandwagon, in 1991 Bunnett’s first recorded exploration of the genre won a Juno, Canada’s recording arts award. Her Blue Note release, “Ritmo + Soul” is the saxophonist’s seventh such recording.

Bunnett quickly points out that each recording has explored a different facet of the many-faceted music saying that in the current session, “We work in an idiom that hasn’t been really experimented with or used as a source of inspiration until now. It’s the one that most interests me mainly because it seems so ignored. Even in Cuba when I was there it was very marginalized.”

The saxophonist is quite aware of the dangers of over commercializing or anglicizing what is at its core an artform with its own set of traditions. She said, “In terms of Afro-Cuban folkloric music we’ve been working pretty heavily with very traditional music. For example the percussionist who is with us, Pancho Quinto, his music is a very traditional form of rumba that’s only learnt at the docks or the places that the musicians tend to live. You can’t really go to school and learn that particular music.”

Bunnett described her involvement with the specific style of Cuban music documented on the album as a long-standing one saying, “I’ve always been on this course with this particular form of Cuban music, even though I work in all the various forms of Cuban music. But it has been the one that I felt that lent itself to the particular way that I play & inspires me.”

Politics is an unavoidable byproduct of any discussion of Cuba. Bunnett wonders what might have been saying, “I can’t imagine what it would have been like if John Coltrane had gone to Cuba and discovered this music, it would have been pretty amazing.“

“I often think of Coltrane’s “Africa Brass” session and some of the things that Pharaoh Sanders did, they were in the same groove as some of these rhythms. If there hadn’t been an embargo at the time some pretty incredible things could have happened with these jazz musicians who were experimenting with the ‘back to Africa’ concept.”

Bunnett could be describing her fellow members of Spirits of Havana when she attempts to define the unique quality of the typical Cuban musician, “The sheer energy that the Cuban musicians put out attracts our attention. They play very intensely and with a lot of stamina. They’re all very serious about what they’re doing.”

As Bunnett says, “It’s very seldom that you meet a mediocre Cuban musician.”