Mi Mundo

Go looking for music off the beaten Buena Vista track in Havana, and chances are you’ll come across Brenda Navarrete. There she is, in award-winning percussion troupe Obini Bata, playing the batá drums used to praise the Afro-Cuban orishas. There she is, singing with Interactivo, the jazz collective led by Roberto Carcassés, or performing a set of her own material at Barbaram Pepito's Bar. Outside Cuba she has worked with everyone from Brazilian instrumentalist Munir Hossn to Cuban-Canadian pianist and composer Hilario Duran; more recently she has played in the new supergroup Havana Meets Kingston. Now the busy 28-year-old has recorded her own solo debut album, as innovative and rhythmic as it is elegant and spiritual.

Featuring four self-penned originals including ‘A Ochun’, a reflective ode to a deity that features call-and-response vocals, piano and flute, spoken word and soaring, complex harmonies alongside Navarrete's expressive singing. The jazz-fusion wig-out ‘Namaste’ takes inspiration from the subcontinent, applying her batá side-by-side with tabla as she traces old musical links between India and Cuba, her longtime collaborator Alain Pérez weighing in on dynamic bass. Pérez's ‘Taita Bilongo’ is here too, kicking off as a guaguancó and taking in jazz and some frenetic mambo, with improvised call-and-response vocals keeping things urgent and fun. Highlights, like new ideas, are frequent– Duke Ellington's ‘Caravan’ is reinvented as ‘Caravana’ – as Navarrete shows off her range.