Arts / Music
Brunswick musician is big in Havana
Prize strengthens a Cuban connection for Alex Pertout
Andra Jackson
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Cuba and Brunswick might seem worlds apart but not for one local resident who just just won a prestigious Cuban music award.
Percussionist, composer and academic Alex Pertout’s latest albumVIAJES, carried off a Premio Internacional prize in the 2026 Cuban music awards announced in Havana on May 16.
The annual awards known as Cubadisco were established in 1997 and this year covered 35 categories with over 200 entries.
They are announced during a week-long international music fair that includes concerts, workshops, a symposium and a trade exhibition. Pertout has been invited to perform at next year’s awards.
The Brunswick-based percussionist is the first Australian to carry off the award as a solo artist.
Entries are assessed for technical and artistic excellence by panels of academics and industry experts. The international category award is for outstanding foreign recordings, both international collaborations with Cuban artists or for foreign artists whose music reflects a strong affinity with Cuban music and culture.
Cuban musician Roberto Fonseca who headlined at WOMADelaide last March also won a Premio Internacional for his recording Nuit Parisienne à la Havane with French cellist Vincent Segal.
Pertout previously shared in the award as a producer 16 years ago of a world music recording of a duo project with singer Nilusha Dassenaike titled Tales To Tell.
“This award for VIAJES (Travels) really means something special to me as it is for me as a solo artist, for a personal album of my works which I developed over years and which is really close to my heart,” he said.
The honour came after Australian Musician magazine had just named him Musician of the Month in its March edition.
For Pertout, the award is also recognition of his Latin American heritage combined with recognition of his long connection to Cuban music.
He was born in Chile but his parents moved to Italy when he was young before migrating to Australia in the early-1970s. Ever since the age of fifteen, he remembers being drawn to Cuban music.
“I am touched that it (the recording) has been recognised in Cuba,” he said.
In Australia, Pertout has played with a diverse range of artists from jazz pianist Tony Gould to Powderfinger, Kate Ceberano, Daryl Braithwaite and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
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Pertout has lived in the inner north for most of his adult life, moving to an apartment in Brunswick from Coburg 10 years ago.
He enjoys the area’s vibrant energy along with its proximity to his other job as a senior lecturer in Jazz and Improvisation in the faculty of Fine Arts and Music at Melbourne University.
He also takes a class for students from other faculties that introduces them to rhythm using anything from sticks and pads and shakers to homemade percussion instruments to anything handy.
It taps into mental well-being for students from disciplines like medicine or science. It has proven highly successful with more than 1000 attendees the first two semesters it was held and it is now run over summer.
“It is to do with opening up your horizons,” Pertout says.
Creating the award-winning album VIAJES took Pertout a decade, using an unusual composition technique.
“I grew up here as a studio musician playing a lot of rock music adding to what they already had down. I would be asked ‘What do you hear?’ ”
He would add what came to him and the recording would develop “like a painting on a canvas”.
That layered approach to writing the tracks took him around the world as he selected the performers he felt most suited to adding vocals or a guitar or horn parts that he would add to a number he had written the basics for.
His musical journey took him to Chile, Cuba, Argentina, Ireland, Mexico, New York and India. Most of the album was mixed at a desk in his apartment overlooking magnificent views of Brunswick.
The result is an album that features as guests some of the biggest names in jazz and other genres internationally and locally such as American guitarist Mike Stern, Argentinian singer Alan Plachta and Chilean singer Magdalena Matthey and Australia’s saxophonist Sandy Evans.
Pertout composed or re-arranged all six tracks and played more than a dozen percussive instruments along with synthesizers.
The tracks include a rearranged Chilean folk-song that was collected by famed Chilean folklorist Violeta Parra, and a re-arrangement of a Cuban song featuring a Cuban-Afro chant recorded with Cuban musicians.
“It has a very spiritual feel,” he says. There are two boleros that he describes as a sad love story.
Pertout grew up listening to boleros; his father was a singer who loved boleros and his mother was an opera singer who sang on one of his earlier recordings.
The track, ‘Ashirvad’ features Indian Carnatic singer Charulatha Mani and award-winning Sandy Evans. Pertout was a founding member of the innovative Australian Art Orchestra that introduced collaborations with Carnatic musicians.
“It takes the music somewhere else,” he says of Mani’s vocal overlay.
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Magnificent effort by this local musical artist having his work appreciated and recognised in Cuba. Also love Pertout’s role in involving Melbourne University students from other disciplines outside of his jazz and improvisation specialty in music.