 Sopranosaxophonist and flutist Jane Bounette was born and lives in Toronto, and has received many major Canadian awards, including the Order of Canada, the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal, the Premier's Award for Excellence, and four Juno Awards. She's an Amherst to perform at UMass with her band Maquique. With Maquique, Bounette has created something new and phenomenal. What started out five years ago as a project to record and mentor young, brilliant Cuban female musicians has become one of the top groups on the North American jazz scene. In the last couple of years, they have played major jazz festivals like Newport and Monterey, been featured on NPR's Jazz Night in America, were nominated for a Grammy Award for their latest release, Odara, and voted as one of the top ten jazz groups in Downbeat Magazine's Critics poll. It's a great honor to have Jane Bounette here and Amherst with us. So Jane, I wanted to talk about your early career and serendipity because you had a major injury. You grew up playing piano in the European classical tradition and were quite far along on that pass and then had a serious injury, and that changed your whole trajectory of your musical career. So I want you to talk a little bit about the role of luck and serendipity and chance and how it got you where you are today. Well, my background, my parents weren't musicians, but we had a very lively, creative household. I'm the youngest of three kids and there's a seven-year difference pretty much between the three of us being the youngest. So the arts were always very encouraged, especially my parents were very much into visual arts. So they often, weekends, when my father maybe would have a Saturday off, would go to art galleries, the small independent art galleries that were supporting young painters, sculptures, visual arts. And I would often tag along with them and be exposed to this world. And we finally moved when I was tiny to a bigger house and the house that we bought had a piano in it. So my father was sort of born on a farm and I guess it was a status thing in those days to have a piano and he never had a piano in the family. So this was a bonus to buy this house because there was a piano in it. And I loved to play it and my sister was given lessons, but it never took for her. And later I was given piano lessons and I really loved it. But I was always in between, I was very, you know, like a lot of children. I wasn't totally, you know, focused and especially as a teenager I was just all over the map. I went to five high schools to give you an example of my academic career. Did you get kicked out of four of them? Three of them I got kicked out of. Two of them I chose to leave. So, you know, the academia world was very tough for me, but I was very creative and always in between art and music. And yeah, so when I was later, you know, I'd never really finished things. I would sort of get halfway with something and then get bored with it and move to something else. And when I was about 16 or 17, having stopped and started with a couple of piano teachers because I didn't like them and I didn't really like practicing, I then went at it again at age 16. And I went at it a little bit too hard and that's when I did develop tendonitis. And I had a wonderful teacher, his name was Harry Heap. He only took about 10 students. He just lived around the corner, my mom heard about him. And I went and auditioned for him and he was a student of somebody who was a very famous musician. I think she was from England, Mona Bates. So it was kind of a privilege to be able to study with he. So I went in and auditioned to see if he would take me as a student and I played Love Is Blue. Remember that song? It was a big hit in the 60s. And I think I played the theme from Romeo and Juliet. And I had one other poppy thing and then I played one Bach Prelude, the very first one. And he said to me, you're very musical, but I don't teach that other stuff that you're doing. I don't teach that. And this is, if you're going to study with me, this is what you're going to have to do. And from there he really formed my study habits then because I proceeded to study of course Bach, Beethoven, a lot of more modern composers like Aaron Copeland and Debussy, Ravel. And he made me from the get-go memorize music. So at that point, either I would just be sitting at the piano improvising and taking a piece and doing with whatever I wanted. You know, losing counts, dropping beats, you know, all over the map. I had to start with very, very defined discipline regimen of working on sometimes eight pieces at a time and memorizing each, you know, let's say 12 bars a day of each piece. So it was a heavy workload and it was discipline, which I had never really had. We were very loose with us, with me in particular being the youngest. The other two were, you know, grown up. Anyway, he was a wonderful teacher, but I ended up, you know, damaging my hand because I finally, when I started to sort of find myself and feel like I was advancing, that's when, you know, this injury happened. I was, you know, very disappointed and that, you know, it took about a year for this thing to really build up so that it was like I couldn't even, you know, pick up a cup. It hurt so much. So my mom took me to see some doctors and they wanted to do some surgery and my mom was like, I don't think so. And then one of the doctors said, rest, you know. I think she just needs to not play for a while, let's say six weeks, and then let's see. It might just settle down. So I went with my cousin to San Francisco, suggested going somewhere warm too, was I think of February, January, February. Went to San Francisco and found this club Keystone Corners. And it happened the night that I arrived in San Francisco that the Charles Mingus group was playing, performing there. And we went the first night and the second night and went every single night. And it was just an enlightening, you know, experience. At that time, even though I'd been exposed to jazz and my father having kind of a bit of a jazz collection, not big, but you know, standard things, Count Basie, Allington, Teddy Wilson. My brother had some Mingus records so I was familiar with the name which drew me in. When I returned to Toronto after the three weeks, I had pretty much made up my mind I want to play jazz. But I did not know how I was going to proceed in that music. I decided that I would finish up my piano studies because I was going for my grade 10 piano, which was kind of the focus of, okay, finally I'm going to get something. Couldn't cut, you know, being a brownie, couldn't cut it and girl guides. You know, I got no badges, I've got no nothing. I want to get this certificate that says I've got my grade 10. So I did that and then I decided I really want to play jazz. How am I going to do this? No universities, no jazz departments at the time. And eventually by another accident found this place that was doing workshops and there was a couple of jazz artists there that were teaching how to improvise. And I just started hanging out there and I signed up, you know, for like 10 classes and I started meeting like-minded people that were into jazz. Some of them were my age, some of them were older adults that had, you know, jobs. I was still living at home, you know, with my parents. And going out, I started going out more to clubs and hanging out in the record stores and asking the guys that worked in the stores, who's this guy Archie Shep? Can you put this on for me and stuff like that. Now at that point had you picked up the flute or the soprano? I had played flute in high school and I had started on the clarinet in public schools. So that's like, it was a small school band and I auditioned though they had, you know, the teacher who would travel around to the local little public schools to teach band class. You know, they would ask the kids who wants to learn, who wants to be in the band and I really wanted to be in the band. I really wanted the flute at first and there was no flutes left. So, you know, he did air training with everybody and he wanted me to play the violin. I guess because I had a good ear. And I was like, I don't want the violin. He was like, okay, how about cello? And I was like, I don't want a cello. I wanted a shiny instrument. Flute was the one I wanted most. All the flutes were gone, I think there was two. And in the end he gave me his personal silver clarinet to play, which I played on for grade five, grade six. And then he happened when I went to the next school for grade seven and eight. He was still at that school, so I used his clarinet for that. And then after I was finished grade eight, I was sent to a girl's private school and there was no music, there was nothing creative at that place. And I really rebelled. So, I didn't have a clarinet, I didn't have that outlet. I mean, I loved playing in the school band as a kid. I loved that feeling of practicing your part and then all of a sudden you were playing your part and all this was happening around you. It was just a great experience, you know, as a child. So, I loved that. And anyhow later, after going to many, many different high schools, like five, like I said, I found myself in my last year of high school playing flute, which was the instrument I really wanted to play. I had a very, I would say, destructive music teacher, which I like to sometimes tell people about this because, you know, you can have somebody in your life that really tries to put you down and keep you from succeeding. And I got very good on the flute quickly because I really loved it and I was putting the time in. So, this is like grade 10 and 11, I'm playing the flute. And at the end, this teacher, he was obviously loved music too. He really fought to get monies from the school department. You know, there's always this fight between sports and the arts in school for the monies. And he managed to get the monies to take the orchestra once even to China. And he would take, you know, form the students. He had a specialty music class, which I really wanted to take and I was allowed to take it. But this was one of these teachers who puts, he's like one of, you know, these kind of people that like to put their imprint on the students and say, I taught that person. It's like sports coach where you pick particular students and say, I'm going to really nurture this student along and the rest of them can all go somewhere else. So, he picked out the students that he thought were really talented and really encouraged them and really spent extra time with them. And many of them were very, very talented. I happened, this particular year that I was in, there was probably eight students that were super, super talented. And at the end of the year, I had decided I thought I wanted to be a professional musician. And so I went, he said, so what are you going to do next year? And I said, well, I think I want to study music. And he went, meh. He said, you'll never be a professional musician. And I said, what do you mean? He said, because you didn't start when you were eight and most people that become professional musicians, they start when they're eight years old, they're prodigies. And I got quite upset and I said, I started crying and I said, you can go to hell, I am so. But anyhow, I still had that in the back of my mind because all these other students were so good and I was mediocre. And anyhow, that's a whole other thing. That always really stuck in my head for a long, long time that I wasn't good enough and it was always going to be hard for me. It didn't come easily. And anyway, much later, even after winning my first Juno award, after like five, they invited students back. I'm like in my 20s at this point. And yeah, I mentioned this thing about, there was kind of a clubby thing that would happen. This is the bad part of the story. On the Monday mornings, when Ben, the orchestra practice was, and I got in the orchestra quickly too, because he needed a flute, I would say like eight in the morning, these students being so chummy with him and like, they'd all been partying on the weekend together with the professor. You know where this is going, right? He's starting to get a little weird. Yeah, so anyhow, it was like, oh man, I wish I was in that club. They're all a lot of music and they're all hanging out. Anyhow, go back, like I'm in my 20, 21, 22, and they're inviting students back to the collegiate that have gone on to do interesting things with their life. I had at this point won a June award for one of my records, and he vetoed me coming back. I found out through my art teacher there who told my sister's friend that didn't want me coming back to the school. So this guy had it, there was something, he had it out for me, you know? And because I wasn't fitting the norm of what he wanted. Anyway, a couple of years later I'm on a plane and this was always as heated at me, this guy, and my husband said, who was the most famous music teacher again? And I said the name and he opened up the newspaper and here was this guy going to jail for molesting students. Oh wow, what a drag. Yeah, so I mean, if this had a real bittersweet thing and maybe in some ways I was meant to have to take the hard road and that's why I've always been kind of my mentors, they've always been people that I've seen outdoing it. And I took on a different way of allowing myself to be mentored. Yeah, it's kind of weird, but it's still like everybody's journey is so personal and the things that happen to you of course affect the course that you're going to take and I don't know if I proceeded to kind of push that thing. I don't know what would have happened. Well, I want to certainly talk about M'keke and your relationship to Afro-Cuban music which is a crowning achievement and an ongoing one, but before we do that I just wanted to touch base with some of my jazz heroes and your jazz heroes who you had a chance to play with and I'm thinking of Don Poolin, Dewey Redman, Paul Blay, Billy Hart. So quickly run us through. They're all so different, oh my God. Just run us through that process, like how did you get from hanging out at jam sessions in Toronto to playing with these jazz players? I guess because I have a lot of, I guess I'm not afraid to be turned, like the worst somebody can say to me is no. And I guess because I'm so inspired by these musical heroes of mine, that was the road that I choose that I want to understand how their minds work. I want to work alongside them to see what I can learn from that, if I can learn something from it. I was never, what's the word, disappointed with all the musicians that I really loved as musical innovators. When I got to know them, I was never disappointed with they as people because they always seem to, their music always seemed to be them. So I think that cannot happen. There probably are some great, there have been a couple of people, a couple of crazy people that I've worked with, brilliant genius people that I saw sides of that kind of spooked me, that real dark sides. But generally, most of the musicians that I love have just become like a special part, like almost family, and I've just learned so much from. So it was just taking that leap, just not being afraid to be turned down. I mean, when I met Dewey, I went running down into his dressing room right after the show. Like a lot of people, maybe in this day and age, you wouldn't do that kind of thing. When musicians would come to Toronto, for example, James Moody and Frank West, and they would sometimes come for a three and four night run, and I would go hear them night after night, and then I would say, you know, next night, could I have a lesson with you? And so I would go to their hotel rooms the next day because a lot of the time, you know, watching TV or something and to find somebody who was really eager to learn, is that, yeah, sure, come on over and I would expect to pay. And they'd go like, forget the money, just practice the stuff I'm showing you type of thing, you know? That you're not just wasting my time, you're going to practice this stuff. But back to Don and Dewey and Billy Hart, these are all people that, you know, you meet them and you see the, just the humility that they have. You know, the nights that they're playing and playing incredible music, and there's like 10 people in the audience. It's something that I try and always keep in mind because sometimes, you know, we as a band, the girls will get somewhere and they'll be like, there won't be a lot of people in the audience. Sometimes we're packed, you know, sometimes it's sold out. But, you know, you have to keep these things in perspective, you know, because I've seen it happen. I've heard Mingus in Toronto where there was like 10 people there and they played their asses off, you know? It was just the most incredible music and I was like, where is everybody? Am I the only person here that's going... I've asked that question myself. Yeah, I'm sure you have, you know? But, you know, I look back or listen to, you know, John Coltrane at the Village Vanguard or Monk at the Five Spot or, you know, Hampton Hawes at the Lighthouse. Yeah. And it's like, wow, this is history being made and there's 35 people there. Exactly. So, you know, that gives me hope that, you know, or it gives me an understanding that, you know, musical success and the course of the music is not related to commercial success. Yeah, and it's often, it's just time, you know? Yeah. Time has to take its place for people to be really valued and appreciated. So, let's move to Cuba and Mequeque. You've been to the island over 100 times and have devoted a lot, almost all of your musical career over the last couple of decades to Afro-Cuban music. So, tell me how you got hooked on it but also how you learn this music which is so complex and so African in nature. Well, not to sound like the classic I'm still learning but I really am still learning. There's like, there's so much. It's the same with, you know, the history of jazz that there's still so many names. You know, I just, when we came in here, I was like, I don't know this guy's name and you said a local trombone player, Greenlee. And I was like, oh, I should know this guy. He played with R.J. Chappell. Oh, God, I've got to check it out. But there's, you know, in Cuban music, my first trip there, I didn't even have any clue. I had, I was playing in a band, getting called sometimes to play in a band, salsa band in Toronto, partly because I could improvise. And everybody in the group was from somewhere else. There was not one Cuban in the group. There was a Chilean. There was someone from Columbia. I think the band leader was Colombian. Someone from Uruguay. Someone from Argentina. Someone from Peru. And they would bring their charts in or something that, you know, just a standard chart and we would play it. And because being a jazz musician, I could play on the Montunos, the repeated vamps and stuff. And do the solos and play the chart. Play the chart down because I could read. But when I got to Cuba, and my first trip and it was just because of going to Mexico, getting sick, went to Cuba 82. And I started to hear this music and like just within the first day of going there, five different styles of Cuban music within just a few hours. This was like, whoa, there was a sound that I had never heard. And then when I went into the city of Santiago and Cuba and heard a couple of the folkloric groups and I would hear this Afro-Cuban sound that was so much like listening to Coltrane's Africa Brass or Feral Saunders, you know, something that Feral Saunders would play. And I would hear Afro Blue by Mongo Santa Maria is actually a traditional Afro-Cuban chant. That's not an original piece. That's actually a chant that he later did something with. So I heard this connection between the two musics that just were like, wow, they're almost similar. But then, you know, as I started to travel the country I realized, number one, there's regional sounds right across the whole country. Very, very, very different. Of course, there's clave in the whole country and cowbells. But then because of the African dyspora and the different groups that came from the slavery times, there was particular languages and particular musical sounds and there's, you know, in the eastern side you hear a very strong Haitian influence especially when you get to want animal and in Camigwe you hear something a little different in Havana, there's a sound, you know, there's still, because it's a big city, certain parts of the European sound like the dance songs and the Contra dances, these are the early classical Cuban music forms from the 18th, 19th century. You start to hear like this incredible world of musics that so many people think Cuban music is just the one thing. So as I started traveling around with Larry, my husband, trumpet player, we started to hear all these different musics and meet the people that were making them and some of them the originators of the music. Kachal Lopez, you know, many people say he's the founder of Marble, you know, and the group that he had, I played often with Frank Emilio, I'd go over to his house and he's the original, or he's the founder of Los Amigos with Guillermo Bereto and Kachal and I played with him and I was like learning firsthand some of these discargas and how they came about and that was one kind of thing, that was a jazz-related thing and then I would go into some small village in Perico when it was way outside of Havana where there's a particular style of music that's not performed anywhere else except there, it's particular to Perico and you get to Barricoa, there's something else different in Barricoa. So, this investigation has just been ongoing the changui, which is a music that you don't hear in Havana at all. All of a sudden now you're hearing people throwing the word around changui and some of the timbre groups and stuff like that because it's starting to become the fashion as Roomba became at one point. But now the changui, you know, that is one of the indigenous music of Cuba and that took me like 15 years to hear. Had to go to Guantanamo to hear that and get deep into Guantanamo because if you just go through Guantanamo you're not going to see anything, really. And so you have to investigate these things, have your ear on the ground and that's been the fun, that's been the adventure. It's just going into these places and speaking to people and they know somebody, I'm going to take you to this guy, he's from Sanchez and that's his little town. On the way to Santiago I'm just doing a blank. But he eventually left for Spain and unfortunately passed away but he had a particular piano style that was like, how do you call it, was like a legend, legendary. Thank you, Jane. It's been really fascinating. Continue this in part two. My name is Glenn Siegel. Thank you very much.