Jane Bunnett - Biography

If you want to be in the right place at the right time, it’s always useful to show up a little early.

Jane Bunnett, the Toronto soprano saxophonist, flutist and bandleader, has built her career at the crossroads between Cuban music and jazz. Twice nominated for Grammy awards and a fixture of the nominations for Canada’s Juno awards, she has turned her bands into showcases for the finest musical talent from Canada, the United States and Cuba. Paquito D’Riviera, the great Cuban saxophonist, has said of her: “Jane is brilliant and she’s been trying so hard to play the real thing. What she’s doing is valid and legit.”

Bunnett’s startling new album, Red Dragon'Fly, is the most ambitious expression yet of her very personal Cuban-jazz fusion: a strongly melodic selection of tunes from a half-dozen nations, backed by the Penderecki String Quartet and performed by Bunnett’s own band, which these days features the formidable 21-year-old pianist David Virelles.
Bunnett has come so far. She’s ready for the next step. Yet in the beginning, all she wanted was a cheap vacation.

It was 1982. Bunnett and her husband, the irrepressible trumpeter Larry Cramer, had a Toronto winter to avoid and as much disposable income to spend on their vacation as jazz musicians generally do — not much. Cuba looked like a good deal. They booked a flight. And their lives changed forever.

What everyone knows now, thanks to Buena Vista Social Club and other recent events — that Cuba is home to an incredibly rich musical tradition kept alive by a vital and ageless musical tradition — had somehow faded from North Americans’ memory in the early 1980s. It sure came as news to the vacationing Torontonians. Everywhere Bunnett and Cramer went they found drummers whose command of rhythmic complexity dwarfed anything you’d hear back home; horn players who deployed amazing dexterity in the service of heartstopping lyricism; pianists who could make any decrepit old upright roar like doom or sing like a heart in love. No fools, they took out their horns and played along. And, realizing how rich and challenging all this music was, they made quick plans to return and study some more.

By the early 1990s Bunnett had become a regular and visitor to Havana’s music venues; she was incorporating Cuban musicians, beginning with the pianist Hilario Durán, into her Toronto bands; and she had released her first Cuban-influenced album, 1991’s Spirits of Havana.

Since then Bunnett has moved from strength to strength, touring internationally and recording a string of critically lauded albums. Her comfortable house in Toronto’s west end has become a home away from home for a growing number of extraordinary young Cuban musicians who’ve migrated to Toronto.

Red Dragon'Fly is both Bunnett’s most ambitious project to date, and her most tuneful and emotive. “The body of work on this recording is made up of songs that we have loved for years — some even from childhood,” she says. The string arrangements — some from young Virelles, others penned by the veteran Toronto multi-instrumentalist Don Thompson — give these folklike tunes from Japanese, Canadian, American Indian and other traditions the feel of chamber music.

Bunnett, playing only soprano saxophone, is cast sometimes as lyric lead balladeer, sometimes (as on the Canadian folk tune She’s Like a Swallow) as a bold and surprising jazz soloist. Most of the material is ancient; Bunnett’s choices and the contexts in which she places these tunes is consistently fresh. For just one example, consider the way Virelles’ arrangement of the South African anthem Nkosi Sekelel I’Africa evolves from mournful to defiantly playful in the space of a few minutes. Or the way Thompson’s string setting recasts the Japanese folksong Moon Over Ruined Castle in territory closer to French Impressionism than anything familiar. “This is something new from us,” Bunnett says. In a way, Red Dragon'Fly is her emancipation proclamation: she’s spent her career mastering the musical traditions of countries close to home, but now she’s making the whole world her study. Which means it’s time the whole world got to know her.