Eliana Cuevas left her native Caracas, Venezuela, as a teen to go live in a Toronto home-stay and learn to speak English

A dozen years ago, Eliana Cuevas left her native Caracas, Venezuela, as a teen to go live in a Toronto home-stay and learn to speak English. It happens all the time, of course. People come to this prosperous country from all over the world to reinvent their lives and themselves. It's what makes us so richly diverse and international. It's what keeps things interesting. But a funny thing happened to Cuevas. She was always enamoured of music -- she was in choir back home, sang around the house a lot, but that's true of lots of kids. In her case she turned out to have quite a stunning, preternatural gift. Or so she found out when she started hanging at a club that featured Latin dancing, which she loved. Never mind she was still in high school and was getting in under false pretenses. A girl's gotta dance. So she asked the band if they needed a singer, which they didn't. But that led to an introduction to another band just starting up and, ultimately, a whole community of Latin music makers of all sorts. Singing with anyone who would have her, she was soaking in an amazingly broad palette of influences, everything from Latin-jazz and reggae to salsa and flamenco. 'Yeah, I've been involved in few different projects,' says Cuevas. 'That's where I've gotten most of the influences that I bring into my music now, it's mostly from the things I've learned being able to perform with other people. What I do with my band is not really traditional, it's more of a mix of everything.'