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KEYBOARD player Jeremy Ledbetter was excited this year to win his first Juno, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy, for his second jazz trio album Gravity. In celebration, they have been doing jazz gigs and festivals across Canada this summer with brief stops in Norway and at Ronnie Scott’s, a leading jazz club in London. Few in Canadian realise that although he was born in Canada and lives in Toronto, musically Ledbetter has strong roots in Trinidad. He lived here for a number of years when he started working as a musician and continues to return on a regular basis, often as the leader of David Rudder’s band but most recently at this year’s Jazz on the Greens as the keyboardist for pannist Joy Lapps’ band back in May. Ledbetter is the regular keyboardist for her band, and her drummer and husband Larnell Lewis is also the drummer for his Jeremy Ledbetter Trio. But that is just some of the musicians he works with regularly. He had previously come down with Alexis Baro’s group and his band CaneFire. Beyond performing, Ledbetter has also done record production for several artistes in the Toronto jazz and Latin music community. He is the keyboardist and band leader for his wife leading Venezuelan vocalist Eliana Cuevas, and has produced several of her records. He also produced the latest recording for the Cuban female duo Okan, which was a 2023 Juno Award winner. Over the years he has performed on numerous jazz and Latin albums and became a sought-after record producer. Almost every album he has been involved with recently has either been nominated or won a Juno. Ledbetter grew up in Toronto and from an early age was fascinated with classical music, listening to Beethoven and Mozart. His parents sent him for piano lessons and soon he was hooked. Initially, it was classical music, then he had a period of being obsessed with the blues, as his interests broadened into jazz and world music. While working on his undergraduate music degree as a student at York University in Toronto, Ledbetter applied and got accepted to study abroad to UWI in ST Augustine, for the Fall 2000. His plan was to learn everything he could about steelpan, an instrument he was fascinated by from the first time he heard it. Once he got to UWI, Ledbetter was studying under Harold Headley, Sat Sharma and Mervyn Williams at UWI and broadening his horizons way beyond pan. Headley started taking him along to rehearsals for Mungal Patasar’s group Pantar. Very quickly, he was making connections with musicians in the soca scene and started playing keyboards with various bands like Qwestion, Nigel and Marvin Lewis and Atlantic. He performed on records with Bunji Garlin, Destra Garcia and Rikki Jai (Samraj Jaimungal.) among others. Guitarist Wayne Bruno became a friend and was with him in various lineups. It was Bruno who got him connected with David Rudder. Now before Ledbetter ever came to Trinidad, a friend in Toronto told Ledbetter that if he was going to Trinidad then he should go see Rudder. So he went to a concert Rudder was doing in Toronto in the summer before he left for Trinidad and before the show was over he was hooked. He said, “I remember David being overwhelmingly incredible. He is just the most extraordinary artist I’ve ever seen in person. It’s impossible to listen to this music without a giant grin on my face.“ When Ledbetter got to Trinidad, he made a point to catch every Rudder concert he could. And with Wayne Bruno’s help, he started performing in his band, a relationship that has been ongoing for decades. So much was going on when it was time to go back to York and finish his degree, Ledbetter couldn’t go, deciding instead to stay and continue playing and producing calypso and soca music in Trinidad. Ledbetter has continued to perform regularly with David Rudder ever since, and has produced a number of Rudder’s albums from Blessed in 2003 to Welcome to Trinidad in 2017. Ledbetter was the musical director for performances of the Rudder and Tony Hall collaboration, The Brand New Lucky Diamond Horseshoe Club in the US and Trinidad. More recently, Ledbetter led the band at David Rudder’s 7.0 concerts in Trinidad and New York in 2023. But this was only a portion of Ledbetter’s musical evolution. His time in Trinidad only got his desire to travel and play different types of music started. While in Trinidad, he saw Tito Puente play... and that started his fascination and devotion to Latin music. He was hooked and almost yearly, he would do extended trips to different places. Over more than a decade he took trips to Nicaragua, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil and Columbia and even to several Southeast Asian countries. After he returned to Toronto, he met Cuevas, who was already a leading vocalist on the Latin jazz scene and and he was soon her bandleader as well as husband. He also formed a Caribbean jazz group soon after he returned to Toronto called CaneFire with 7 members who have put out two albums and performed regularly around the world. CaneFire have visited T&T on numerous occasions, performing at several local jazz festivals and doing workshops with secondary school students. Currently, Ledbetter spends a significant amount of leading his wife Cuevas’s band and has produced five albums for her. She has been touring in and out of Canada and become an international star. A German paper called her, “Musical class on an international Jazz level meets driving Caribbean rhythms and first-class Latin.” Recently, Ledbetter worked to make a dream she had come true. She wanted to record with a full classical orchestra, so he applied and got the funding to record her with a full 29-person orchestra with Ledbetter both creating the scores and conducting the orchestra. The grant called for videos being made in a concert performance as part of the project. But sadly, when it was time to do that, covid lockdowns prevented there being an audience for the orchestral sessions. The album came out and the videos were released to great acclaim but no live performance! Finally, just a few months ago, the album was performed live in Toronto and plans are being made to take it elsewhere. Now his dream is to one day take his jazz trio to Trinidad and to conduct his full orchestrations for his wife Cuevas’s album as well, maybe with the UTT orchestra
