Freedom Resounded at Windrush’s Sunday At The Chateau
By Kira Wronska Dorward
In the tradition of their grandfather and great-grandfather Longinos Guerrero, who was a Mexican travelling troubadour in Texas, Renée Guerrero, her daughter Artemisia LeFay, and son Quintin Harris roamed north from New York last Sunday, all the way to the rolling hills of Hockley and sweeping vistas of Chateau Windrush.
In an unforgettable performance at the Chateau on June 22, “Songs My Father Taught Me” was a showcase not just of their wide ranging and deeply engrained talents, but an opportunity for audience and artist alike to soothe their souls with superb music in troubled times. With the strike on Iranian nuclear facilities that morning, many of us in the audience had thoughts dwelling on the uncertainties of the geopolitical climate, even within the context of stunning views and international award-winning wines offered at Windrush Estate Winery.
“My brother and I are born and bred New Yorkers,” said Artemisia LeFay, who is a classically trained mezzo soprano, and particularly drawn to cabaret music and all things theatrical, vaudevillian, vintage and avante garde.
“I was their first piano teacher and they grew up immersed in opera and classical music hearing all kinds of music,” mother and pianist Renée Guerrero explains.
“My father Gilbert Guerrero was a powerful influence on my music training as my first teacher as a youngster and throughout my lifetime,” Renée continues. “He was extremely proud of his heritage, his composer father and his older brother Louie, who had great success with his international hit La Cacahuata (Peanuts) recorded by Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass in the 1960’s. It was very important to my dad that I get the musical education that he never received. A life-long lover of all types of music whether it was opera, mariachi, jazz, he immersed himself in music every day like his daily bread.”
Renée made her New York City debut in 1990 as a soloist, and since has appeared in key venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and throughout Italy, including a performance of Rhapsody in Blue in a 12-century ship arsenal off the coast of Amalfi.
“My husband Larry Harris is a retired opera singer and prior to that a retired professional football player. We moved from Texas to New York City right after we married in 1990 because the Metropolitan Opera took an interest and funded his operatic training while I was in the master’s program at the Manhattan School of Music as a Piano Performance major.”
Children Artemisia was born in this period, in 1997, and then Quintin in 2000.
“They heard opera – Puccini and Verdi – plus I was also teaching and performing a lot, so they heard a lot of Chopin and Bach,” Renée elaborates.
“Also playing organs for churches all over the Bronx,” adds Artemisia, who too went on to be classically trained in opera.
“My education comes mostly from tutors, one-on-one with different opera masters,” Artemisia expands. “My father has also worked with me. What I consider to be my forte these days is cabaret, specifically what I would call “dark cabaret” because, it is something more variety show and historically inspired than a lot of what I typically see as modern American cabaret.”
“I’m very inspired by history,” she adds, “books about the history of cabaret. Particularly the 1920s and 30s of Germany and France. this was an art form of the people. It was used to both protest and survive political upheaval.”
Artemisia has already been recognized in New York as a rising songwriter and composer. Her latest original show, Wasted Girl, will debut at 54 Below in the fall. It was named in 2024 one of the best cabaret shows in Broadway World, alongside Bernadette Peters and Patti LuPone.
“She’s in good company with these divas,” says proud mother Renée, who at Windrush performed alongside her daughter as her accompanist in addition to her own formidable solo performances.
Artemisia performed from her own work, which is clearly influenced by the nuance of this “dark cabaret” with pieces such as Plum Blossom and Something Wondrous and New.
“She has very exciting future projects with her writing and her performing,” adds Renée.
She then turned to son Quintin Harris who is in demand in New York as a jazz pianist, vocalist, arranger and actor. He’s a recent graduate of William Paterson University and a finalist in the 2022 American Jazz Pianists Competition.
“He’s been selling out Birdland Jazz, the iconic jazz club in Manhattan,” says Renée.
Quintin, who started learning music at the age of four, is also classically trained and, unsurprisingly, got his start hanging around his parents’ gigs.
“I did study classical for awhile,” says Quintin, “but it wasn’t until I was about twelve years old that I heard a record of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong in a new way …and that led me to Canada’s jazz icon, Oscar Peterson. I often call him the “gladiator of the jazz world”: there’s nothing he couldn’t do.”
This led Quintin into venturing more into jazz. “That led to me finding my voice through music.”
Torn between attending college for voice or piano, Quintin was wooed by a personal phone call from iconic jazz master and pianist, Bill Charlap.
“A big goal of mine was singing and playing at the same time. There’s a freedom that I was attracted to with the greats like Nat King Cole…a lot of the great vocalists played piano for themselves.
“There’s this big freedom when you leap into the depths of jazz, and I think you can only get there with focus and connection, whether its melodic or lyrical. It was that kind of focus and seriousness of that music that I wanted to grasp.”
Quintin, who performed some jazz classics as well as his own compositions at Windrush, has a clear talent and star trajectory that pours through his performance.
“I think the trajectory for me now is becoming an authentic and dependable staple in New York City as I immerse myself with both old and current New York and, when I feel ready, moving to other parts of the world and jazz scenes and seeing how I can add my mark…what I can offer.”
“My father did get to experience Artemisia and Quintin in their early stages of music development,” says Renée, “but he died in 2016 before their careers started to take shape. I know he would be so proud of the direction each of them is going, just as my husband and I are proud of their passion and commitment to make a difference with their music. Songs My Father Taught Me is more than just my homage to my father; it is our collective homage to all the amazing composers, musicians and mentors put in our unceasing musical journey.”
Quintin’s dream is to open his own club in New York one day.
“I think especially during the pandemic, we lost a lot.”
“Of course,” agrees Renée, “people all over the world suffered and lost so much. Things were looking bleak and artists particularly suffered, having lost their venues, their audiences and their source of income.”
“You know,” says Quintin, speaking with a wisdom beyond his 25 years, “perhaps that’s supposed to happen. There’s an art to balancing and riding the tidal wave of past, present, and future in live music: looking at it as a beautiful thing rather than a sad thing.”
Artemisia is also working on writing a musical based on one of her past cabaret shows, Ghosts of Weimar Past, “which is again about historical cabaret.
“Something else that I believe in greatly is the artistic legacies of these historically very bohemian areas of New York City, which are very sadly becoming in the eye of the public, something solely to be ‘instagrammable’: something to be seen rather than lived in. I would like to be part of the movement of artists who are ‘degentrifying’: bringing back raw bohemianism and defiant art into those places.”
Performing together is not common for this family of musical geniuses. “Repertoire, style, and genres bring different venues,” explains Quintin.
Performing at Chateau Windrush was an attraction for the trio, who had performed at the winery a year before, “and had an absolutely lovely time presenting George Gershwin in concert,” says Artemisia, “and we wanted to do it again.
Quintin adds that another motive behind the working family trip was to relax in Canada.”
“It’s a very interesting time” says Quintin.
“That’s also kind of a sense to our music. Everything that we do is about a sense of advocacy for marginalized people.”
“Yeah, because that’s where cabaret came from originally,” jumps in Artemisia.
“And that’s what jazz came out of,” finishes Quintin. “So there’s a big sense of fighting back.”
Artemisia makes mention of cabaret era songs, some of which she performed later that day, that were from the Weimar era on abortion and gay rights. “It’s chilling how similar it is.”
“You can literally just start singing those same verbatim lyrics,” adds Quintin, “and have us guess which era we’re talking about. And sometimes you can’t guess.”
“It’s like I’m singing about the headlines,” concludes Artemisia.
It’s appropriate that “Guerrero” means “warrior” in Spanish. During the performance at the Chateau, it’s clear from the pouring out of cabaret from Artemisia, accompanied on piano by her mother, who added her own emotive classical solos, and the soulful jazz numbers by Quintin, that this family is not just performing.
They are fighters in their own way, using music and performance mingled with history and emotion as a means of soothing souls, but also as an audible appeal to be mindful of the past in a troubled present.
“Freedom is something that speaks greatly to me at this time,” says Quintin before he played his own brilliant version of Hymn To Freedom by the late Canadian jazz pianist legend, Oscar Peterson.
Only on a beautiful summer’s day at Chateau Windrush with the grand vistas, delicious wines, and beautiful music could fraught events be both present in people’s minds but also held in a space of suspension to the power of such sheer beauty.
