Alex Cuba, Saturday, Feb. 6 at 8 p.m. at Kay Meek Centre, West Vancouver, co-presented with the Cap Global Roots Series. Sold out.
The week of Feb. 15 is going to be a doozy for Cuban-Canadian artist Alex Cuba.
Not only will he attend the 58th Annual Grammy Awards at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, Calif., having received his second Grammy nomination (this time around in the category of Best Latin Pop Album for his 2015 record Healer), two days later the Smithers-based singer-songwriter will head to his native Cuba to serve as host of a documentary project exploring emerging music in the country.
All this excitement is set to fall smack dab in the middle of his mainly Western Canadian tour, launched last month and bringing Cuba to West Vancouver's Kay Meek Centre Saturday night for a sold-out performance. The artist is scheduled to remain on the road through March (with dates also in Ontario and Quebec) and on April 3 he'll head to Calgary for the Juno Awards as Healer has also been nominated for World Music Album of the Year.
Cuba is no stranger to award nods, for example, he recently received a Latin Grammy (bringing his career total to four), for Best Singer-Songwriter Album, and also has two Junos to his name; however, being honoured is always exciting and something he's grateful for.
"Each album that I manage to put out is to me a new chapter and if that new chapter gets recognized again, that's cool," he says, reached Monday from the road.
His current tour, bringing him close to home, has been longawaited and he's pleased with the response from fans.
"It's been going amazing. We've been having an amazing tour so far. Beautiful," he says.
Joining him on the road are fellow Smithers residents, drummer Jake Jenne and bassist Ian Olmstead, in addition to Cuban-Canadian percussionist Jose Sanchez.
For his latest recording project, Cuba chose to stay in North America, working in Victoria and New York, rather than travel to Cuba as he had for previous releases.
"It's a more soulful album," he says of Healer, focused on songwriting and sounds. While maybe overall, "it's slightly different," than his previous efforts, he still thinks it, "continues on what we've been building on."
Healer features duets with five singer-songwriters, including Canada's Ron Sexsmith, David Myles, Alejandra Ribera and Kuba Oms as well Anya Marina, from New York.
"It sure was a fun thing to do," he says, of collaborating with the other talents.
"They're all people that I know and people that I like and people that we thought would sound great on the songs that we had. That's basically what made us choose them, according to the songs. It was important to have them. .. (sing) something that they feel comfortable," he says.
Cuba met Ribera through the project. "It was a quick connection and a fast connection. She loved the song from the beginning," he says.
When working on the album Cuba came to realize the impact and role music continues to play in his life. "It's been my medicine, my everything. I realized the healing powers of music," he says, and sought to honour that through the project.
"Healer is what I call the very spirit of music," Cuba posted online in November 2014 with a YouTube video teasing Healer's then-pending release. "Where healers are conduits of energy that help people find solutions to problems and create a space for transformation, music also creates that space and is a doorway to other ways of seeing and feeling. I am inspired by the mystery and spirituality of these times, where it seems more necessary than ever to be a 'Healer.' I want to inspire all people with healing powers to believe in it and to do it, create the space in our minds to believe that we have the power of healing ourselves from whatever brings us down as human race," he wrote.
While his latest album only came out last year, Cuba has already penned a number of new songs and is ready to head back into the studio. "The best 12, we make the album, that's how I do it, as we go," he says.
He's also looking forward to the upcoming documentary project, The Cuban Bus, an initiative of Toronto's Those Canadians Media Group. "It's exciting because it's going to be 10 days of discovering new music, meeting people, jamming with them," he says.
Cuba is set to criss-cross the country with filmmakers in a bus that has been refurbished into a mobile recording studio in search of the next generation of Cuban musicians. Plans include releasing a documentary, a digital download music album, as well as online and mobile short clips in Spanish, French and English, according to the company on Vimeo. "Cuba has a long history of creativity and brilliant musicianship. And now, as the political tides change, a generation of young artists are eager to play their music and sing their songs for the outside world," they write.
Cuba makes it home every few years. "Life is busy for me now.
It's hard to go often. The cool thing about this is that I'm going to go to places I've never been to before.. .. It's kind of exciting to see these places, towns I've never been to in the country that I was born," he says.
