Jane Bunnett: Each gig could be the last

Jane Bunnett’s fire-and-ice Afro-Cuban vibe is unlike anything else in jazz. The Toronto-based saxophonist and her young band, Maqueque, churns up a groove that’s unmistakably Cuban, but the watercolors wash over the lines, into post-Coltrane ecstatic grooves, free jazz, African forms and almost anything else Bunnett has soaked up in decades of listening and playing.

The word “maqueque” refers to the “energy of a young girl’s spirit.” Bunnett put together a band of young Cuban musicians, all women, after falling in love with Cuban music in the 1980s. She has made over 100 trips to the island.

Her music, created in collaboration with the band, sounds fresh and spontaneous, not studied.

“I can play different styles of Cuban music and I’m still a student of that music,” Bunnett said. “But I’ve spent a lot of time playing with different musicians on a street level.”

Bunnett studied classical piano at first, but a hand injury put a stop to that. On a trip to San Francisco in the 1980s, she heard the volcanic bassist and bandleader Charles Mingus with his last great band, including explosively creative (and underappreciated) pianist Don Pullen.

The band was so overwhelming that when Bunnett got back home, she resolved to play jazz.

“But there were no jazz studies programs around,” she said. “I also had these blocks in my head — being a woman, being white, being Canadian, I didn’t seem to fit what the possibility of having a future of playing jazz.”

For a while, she schlepped back and forth to New York by bus to study with the great pianist Barry Harris, but couldn’t get Pullen’s spiky, hot piano sound out of her mind.

“I’m drawn to artists who pull a lot of things together, who process a lot of musical opportunities into their sound,” she said.

While in New York, she repeatedly called Pullen, leaving message after message until he picked up the phone.

“You’re very persistent,” Pullen told her.

Pullen and Bunnett ended up playing on three albums together, including a duet album, “New York Duets,” and they became close friends.

She often wonders what would have happened if she had stayed in New York.

“Jazz and Canada — it used to be an oxymoron,” she said. “But if I’d left Toronto, I wouldn’t have had the perspective of honestly coming up with something different, just because of who I am.”

On the Grammy-nominated “Alma de Santiago,” Bunnett fought skeptical producers while working in a studio in Cuba with an unlikely mélange of musicians: a saxophone quartet, a traditional son group from Santiago, and a Comparsa group, with congas and “badass rhythm.”

One of the producers shook his head and said, “This will never work. These styles don’t go together.”

“In our heads, being outsiders, we were like, ‘Why not?’” Bunnett said. “It’s keeping the integrity but breaking rules. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but your musical instinct has to be the judge if something isn’t sitting well.”

Each member of Maqueque has a story. Most of them were trained in the strict classical conservatories of Havana and broke out to study and play traditional Cuban forms.

Drummer Yissy Garcia’s father is legendary Cuban percussionist Bernardo Garcia, but that wasn’t a clear advantage for Yissy.  For a long time, she wasn’t allowed to touch her father’s drums.

“Her parents wanted her to become a belly dancer and her brother to take up the drums,” Bunnett said. Things turned out more or less the opposite — her brother is a choreographer.

Conga player and vocalist MaryPaz Fernandez studied with Oscar Valdez and “the guys that were out there in the percussion world,” as Bunnett describes it.
“Her approach is very different from the other members of the group,” Bunnett said. “That is a hard thing to crack because that world is so macho and she’s really highly respected and has phenomenal technique.”

The most recent addition to Maqueque is Joanna Majoko, a Zimbabwean vocalist who emigrated to the remote mining town of Flin Flon, Canada

“Luckily, she got out of Flin Flon,” Bunnett said with a laugh. Majoko made it to Winnipeg, and then Toronto, to become the newest member of Maqueque about a year ago.

It’s not easy to take a band of Cuban musicians to the United States, and it’s only getting harder.

“I don’t even know where to start, it’s so unpleasant,” Bunnett said.

Since President Donald Trump slashed staffing at the U.S. embassy in Havana and imposed new travel restrictions, Bunnett has been bringing the band to her house in Toronto. For each gig in the U.S., the have to re-apply for visas that only allow one entry.

Last month, alleged “sonic attacks” on U.S. and Canadian embassy staff in Havana made the situation worse. “They’ve shut down all visa processing at the Canadian embassy in Havana,” Bunnett said. “Now the group has to go either to Mexico, maybe, or to Guatemala.”

The members of Maqueque have one more year on their Canadian visas and the group’s future is uncertain.

After playing Lansing, Bunnett and Maqueque will make the 10-hour drive to do a show in Ottawa, then back to Iowa for a show July 5. Instead of going back to Cuba in the interim, the members have to stay at Bunnett’s house and re-apply for U.S. visas.

“The costs are insane, the stress is insane,” she said. “Every single performance we do, we don’t take for granted. I feel like it could be the last time."