While listening to Jane Bunnett rave about Kiran Ahluwalia, it suddenly dawns on me that the acclaimed horn player could well be talking about her own approach to making music.

Don't get me wrong, I am not suggesting that Bunnett is, pardon the pun, blowing her own horn. I've known her for a good many years and she's way too modest to do that.

But, anyone familiar with the genre-bending approach to making music that the two share would draw the same conclusion.

"Basically," Bunnett tells me after a long day working on her 15th album, "If you have a great voice, you're fine tuning what you've got all the time, you do your homework and tap into the things that move you emotionally, then you're gonna do something interesting, if not remarkable.

"Kiran puts a lot of energy into a specific genre and she's amazing at what she does, but when she turns her ear to something else that tweaks her interest and investigates it a little bit... "

Bunnett trails off and doesn't really need to finish her thought. We know that her next words would be "some kind of magic will manifest itself."

And that's evidenced in each of these groundbreaking artists' recordings.

Since releasing her debut album, Kashish, seven years back, Ahluwalia has increased the vocabulary and popularity of ghazals -- a romantic song form that originated in Persia around the 10th century and introduced to India four centuries later -- by collaborating with non-Indian musicians and introducing Western instruments into the mix.

And over the course of 14 albums and countless collaborations, Bunnett has helped popularize Cuban music and gained serious props along the way. In 2002, the prestigious Smithsonian Institute recognized her for her "lifetime of dedication to the enrichment and diffusion of Latin music."

Reached on her cellphone while driving somewhere in Arizona, Ahluwalia, who'll be performing with Bunnett and her Spirits Of Havana band at the sixth annual Global Divas concert next Wednesday, talked about her love of collaboration.

"I listen to different kinds of music and when I hear something I really like, I want to compose something that will allow that influence to join with mine and create something new," she says.

"That's what happened with the Portuguese collaboration."

Ahluwalia was familiar with fado (the melancholic Portuguese song form) but began listening to it again a few years back when there was a resurgence in interest in the music.

"I found peace and calm in it and when I was in Portugal, I said, 'I can't pass up this opportunity to try and collaborate with Portuguese musicians.' "

Ahluwalia did and surprised us by adding fado instruments and ornamentation to several songs on her latest disc, Wanderlust. The mix works remarkably well and the album has not only generated excellent press, it's also been nominated for a Juno for World Music Album of the Year.

Ahluwalia says fado has impacted her own singing style.

"The singers are very dramatic and almost theatrical when singing," she says. "I found it interesting that not only was there emotion in the voice, in the chords and in the melody itself, but there was also this physical emotion.

"In ghazals, there isn't a tradition to be so dramatic," she explains. "In fact, I probably bounce around more than any other ghazal singers I know. I think that just by watching fado singers, my singing has become more dramatic. So I've learned one more way to present my music -- in terms of how I am going to throw my voice out."

For Bunnett, each edition of Global Divas -- a fundraiser for St. Stephen's Community House -- is an enlightening albeit challenging experience.

On Wednesday, Bunnett and her band will be performing at the Glenn Gould Studio (250 Front St. W.) at 8 p.m. with Ahluwalia, Turkish folk singer Brenna MacCrimmon, Brazilian jazz and bossa nova singer Maria Farinha, and Zimbabwe-born singer Uitsile Ndlovu.

"All of us are improvising and that's the most important aspect of Global Divas," Bunnett says. "If we were just backing a singer, it would be a whole other thing. But we're a Cuban group and our sensibilities lie in jazz and our interests lie in different musical genres. And hopefully the people we're backing have that improvisational ability so that we can stretch and come up with something different."