After almost 15 years, Mimi Snider has returned with a new concert, performing and creating with renewed strength, a deeper appreciation for the voice, and an even more intimate relationship with the music.
This new concert celebrates musical conversations that crossed oceans, cultures, and generations and traces the rich and often overlooked exchanges occurring between the late 1800s through to the 1950s that helped shape American jazz. Through the waterways and highways connecting Cuba, Mexico, New Orleans, New York City, and to other parts of the Americas such as Brazil, Cuban, Brazilian, Mexican, and American musicians shared rhythms, melodies, sounds, and ideas in an increasingly rich musical way.
The half century or so leading up to the Cuban Revolution of 1959 was particularly fertile. Cuban and American musicians were in close musical dialogue, with artists travelling between Havana, New York, New Orleans, Mexico, and other locations, including Brazil. During this period, Afro-Cuban rhythms increasingly became an integral part of the language of American jazz, while jazz itself—including bebop—found new pathways into Cuban music and other musical communities throughout the Americas.
The Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the political rupture in U.S.–Cuban relations that followed profoundly changed these patterns of travel and exchange, creating a new chapter in the relationship between the musical cultures of Cuba and the United States. The musical dialogue continued, but the environment in which Cuban and American musicians could exchange ideas had changed for a time. And during that time, Brazilian bossa nova would create another extraordinary chapter in the conversation between Brazilian music and American jazz.
This concert returns to that earlier era of musical exchange—late 1800s to mid 1900s—not as a fixed historical moment, but as part of an ongoing conversation. It honours the roots from which American jazz grew: primarily African-derived rhythms and African American musical traditions both rooted in communities descended from enslaved Africans, while also drawing upon European harmonic and instrumental traditions, as well as musical influences from Indigenous communities. It also honours the cultural and musical exchanges between Cuba, New Orleans, Mexico, and New York City during jazz's formative years, and later Brazil.
This new concert is a reflection of that continuing conversation and a celebration of those who carry the legacy forward.
For Mimi Snider, this is more than a return to the stage. It is a continuation—a reconnection with a musical lineage that has always understood that music can cross borders and that songs carry history. It is also a rediscovery of the voice: a voice shaped by what came before and, with care and respect, finding new life by listening, remembering and continuing the conversation.
This concert is dedicated to two significant music mentors both gone too soon: Kate Hammet-Vaughan, Jazz Vocalist, Capilano University, Vancouver Community College and Patrick Parson, Artistic Director Ballet Creole, York University.