Jazz bandleader Jane Bunnett speaks in Toronto

Trish Crawford Entertainment Reporter

Married jazz musicians Jane Bunnett and Larry Cramer took a trip to Cuba in 1982 that changed the course of their music.

In a largely empty resort outside the city of Santiago de Cuba, they were invited onstage to play with an 18-piece band.

"We were so nervy," laughs Bunnett, a multiple Juno winner and leader of Jane Bunnett and the Spirits of Havana. Once they heard the music, they raced back to their room for their instruments and then sat in the bar with their cases on their laps waiting for an invitation.

One of the beauties of Cuban jazz is that there are natural spaces in the music where musicians can improvise and that's what the two did that night. This experience ignited an interest in Cuban music, she says, and because the town was on the Caribbean side of the island she was able to see the influences of "Jamaican, Haitian and African culture, all mixed in."

Bunnett's 30-year journey into the Cuban jazz scene is summed up in Mundo: The World of Jane Bunnett, a two-CD compilation that is being released in February. It is also the topic of her Monday night appearance at the Toronto Reference Library Jan. 23 at 7 p.m. where she will be interviewed by Star reviewer John Terauds (see www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/appelsalon for information).

Bunnett also appears at Hugh's Room on Jan. 27 with the Heavyweights Brass Band and at the Lula Lounge Jan. 28 for an evening billed as a "salsa dance party."

The new release, which includes some songs not recorded before, comes a few years after a debilitating depression stopped her in her tracks in 2007.

"I don't know any artist who doesn’t go through these ups and downs. It all happened in the tumbling down of the recording industry."

She characterizes it as a time of great self-doubt and exhaustion.

"I was so physically exhausted from touring, trying to find work, trying to keep our group going and I felt my work wasn't so interesting anymore. There are lots of Cuban musicians in Canada now."

She returned to Cuba to work on Embracing Voices with the Creole Choir of Cuba, a group she worked with years ago when it was called Grupo Vocal Desandann.

"Working on this new material started to get me out of my funk."

Filmmaker Elisa Paloschi has recorded Bunnett’s journey to recovery in a documentary, also called Embracing Voices, an Eyesfull production that is being submitted to documentary competitions.

When asked if this was a mid-life crisis, Bunnett burst into laughter and said, "Yes." Not everyone would want that recorded for posterity, but Bunnett said, "Yeah, go ahead."

She was followed not only to Cuba but also Banff and to the Juno Awards where Embracing Voices won Contemporary Jazz Album of the Year in 2009.

Bunnett thinks one of the reasons she felt so blue is that many of her older jazz musician friends were dying.

Although Mundo: The World of Jane Bunnett is being called a "best hits" collection, she admits that some of the pieces are just sentimental favourites where it is not so much her musicality but her memories that make them special.

One example is a song from her 1996 album Chamalongo that she recorded in Cuba. "Amor Por Ti" ("Love for You") was an Italian song given a rumba beat and featured legendary Cuban performers, percussionist Tata Guines and singer Merceditas Valdes.

"We did this very unusual version. For years the two hadn't spoken to each other. They used to work together, but there'd been a rift. Although he's not a singer, he sings with her and me playing the saxophone. That was a special moment.

"After we brought them together, they were friends again."

Both Valdes and Guines are dead now and this is Bunnett's way of remembering them.

There are so many people that I was connected to and they are not here anymore. They were my extended family.

"For me, there is so much history on these recordings".