After apprenticing in Carolina Chocolate Drops with Rhiannon Giddens, LEYLA McCALLA emerged with a whole new thing – mashing banjo, cello, New York, New Orleans and Haiti into a unique musical gumbo. The history she mines is dark, but as she insists to VI

WHEN LEYLA McCALLA WAS TALKING TO HER BAND ABOUT THE GUITAR freak-out she wanted to close Tree, a track from her newest album Sun Without The Heat, she said it should sound “like a woman losing her mind as she’s trying to figure out how to get the love she needs.” She wanted it to sound like they were fighting, like they were on the edge of a cliff, that they were making a “catastrophic cacophony” that didn’t so much break the tension as smash it on the rocks. “I’m a big proponent of chasing the fun approach to getting to the end of a song,” McCalla laughs. “You know, we’re on this cliff-hanger – then we just veer in a different direction and turn it into a dance party.” McCalla is used to keeping things in harmonious balance, whether she’s moving between cello, banjo and guitar, or writing songs that wear heavy learning with light grace. Her solo debut, Vari-Colored Songs, was a tribute to the writer Langston Hughes; her last album, 2022’s febrile Breaking The Thermometer, explored the archives of Radio Haiti, the country’s first Kreyòl-language radio station founded during the brutal Duvalier dictatorship. Born in New York to Haitian parents, raised in New Jersey, “discovered” playing Bach in New Orleans by Tim Duffy, manager of Rhiannon Giddens’ string band Carolina Chocolate Drops, McCalla makes music that has stories bursting from every note, a deep, reflective synthesis of Haitian folk and old-time Americana, Afrofuturism and Tropicália, English and Kreyòl.

For Giddens, asking McCalla to join Carolina Chocolate Drops was “a no-brainer”; McCalla’s Caribbean styles instantly expanded the group’s Northern string-band palette. She played on the 2012 album Leaving Eden, but she began as a touring member; Giddens recalls McCalla’s audience-delighting performance of Haitian folk song ➢

Here comes the sun: joy-seeker Leyla McCalla feels “like a professional processor of history.”