Email to a friend Printer friendly Font: * * * * “There’s a post-multicultural thing going on in the country and certainly in this city,” says Buchbinder, combating a flu with some chicken noodle soup at a cafe near his rehearsal studio in Toronto’s Liberty Village. “Multiculturalism is very much about people reproducing in some unreal way their culture of origin.

This [album] is a more nimble and exploratory response to [the fact] that we find ourselves in a city that has so many people from so many backgrounds. To me, the coolest direction is towards the development of something that nobody’s heard before.” Buchbinder first discovered Latin music in the early ’80s in Germany, where he played in a salsa band with American and Puerto Rican GI’s. More recently, he experimented with Cuban rhythms with his longtime outfit, The Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band.

For instance, he says, “we took the Romanian hora in 3/4 and put it up against the Afro-Cuban 6/8. But I felt to really do it right, I had to find someone from the Cuban side.” Buchbinder was introduced to Duran by producer/bassist Roberto Occhipinti when all three artists were up for Juno awards last year. “He was quite into some of my somewhat unusual compositions,” Buchbinder recalls.

Duran gave the trumpeter some recordings of Cuban folk music, while Buchbinder gave the pianist “turn-of-the-20th-century klezmer music, including some stuff that was recorded in a village in 1910. He soaked it up and really dug it.” Both musicians began writing music reflecting the other’s tradition.