THERE’S LITTLE DOUBT that Mary Ancheta’s upcoming tribute to the late funk innovator Betty Davis is going to be one of the party-time highlights of the 2025 Vancouver International Jazz Festival. The combination of the local keyboardist’s upbeat personality, an inspired band, Davis’s gritty tunes, and three powerfully distinctive singers is a recipe for wildly creative fun.
But there’s a serious side to Ancheta as well, one that was understandably triggered by the events of April 26, in which a motorist plowed into the Lapu Lapu Day celebration of Filipino-Canadian culture, killing 11 and injuring many more. Once the shock wore off, Ancheta—who was born in Hamilton, Ontario to Filipino parents—realized that she had a useful response to the disaster, in the form of her tune “Minokawa”.
Now available on Bandcamp, with all proceeds going to the victims of the assault, it’s a sonic portrait of a monstrous, mythical bird, credited in the Philippines with being the cause of lunar eclipses. It’s an almost demonic entity, but music, in particular the banging of gongs, can cause Minokawa to open its mouth and let the Moon escape, and so Ancheta’s tune is a good antidote to the eclipse of the heart caused by the Lapu Lapu Day tragedy.
“Exactly,” Ancheta agrees from her Vancouver home during a Zoom conversation, adding that “Minokawa” is also a sneak preview of her upcoming solo album, in which she combines her love of North American soul and jazz with her Filipino heritage.
“This project was already in the works, and we were looking at release dates and all these things, and then this tragedy happened,” she continues. “So it was a matter of ‘What do we want the first single to be?’ but also we found it hard to respond. People were still being found, people were still being looked for. So eventually we felt that our response was that Filipinos are always making music in times of joy and in times of tragedy. So it was our decision to put it out and then to donate all of the Bandcamp money that it raised. That felt good to us. It felt appropriate to be able to help in the way that we can.”
The upcoming record brings Canada and the Philippines together in a way that nicely mirrors Ancheta’s own identity. On one hand, it draws on the Pacific archipelago’s rich tradition of percussion music, which Ancheta’s associate Alvin Cornista recorded in the field. With that as her starting point, Ancheta then journeyed to Calgary’s National Music Centre to explore its vast collection of vintage synthesizers, including Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff’s massive TONTO, as used on Stevie Wonder’s influential Talking Book album. Additional touches were recorded in Vancouver, with a quartet of top-flight string improvisers including Parmela Attariwala, Meredith Bates, Peggy Lee, and Josh Zubot.
