LEYLA McCALLA TUNES INTO THE VODOU TRADITIONS AND ÉMIGRÉ STORIES OF RADIO HAITI
“IN HAITI, they call me ‘blan’, which means ‘white’.” Leyla McCalla, folk cellist, singer, banjo-player and first-generation Haitian-American, takes a moment to let this sink in over the video call from her home in New Orleans. “So I had all these conflicting feelings growing up. Who am I and what’s my place in the world? Music helped me process that.”
Despite a Scottish surname (from a Jamaican grandfather) and an Arabic first name (“No one ever knows where I’m from. Maybe that’s why I’m shouting it from the rooftops”), McCalla is the daughter of two émigrés who fled Haiti to escape the murderous Duvalier dynasty. Now her fourth solo album, Breaking The Thermometer, finds her digging through the archives of Radio Haiti, the first station to broadcast in Kreyòl, to tell a story once hidden by a culture of silence. “Those who lived through these years were told never to talk about what happened,” she explains. “A lot of this LP is about my memories of childhood and filling in the gaps.”
McCalla puts her musical abilities down to a series of happy accidents. After trying figure skating, tennis and ballet, she picked up the cello. Despite studying classical music at university, a discovery at a party in Brooklyn changed her outlook. “I saw this band, The Voodoo Drums Of Haiti, with a cello. I hadn’t thought it could exist in that world. You can play polyrhythms? Holy shit! That’s a thing? You can bang it, you can hit it, pluck it, strum it? Sign me up!” Memories came flooding back of childhood and all-night parties in Port-au-Prince’s storied Hotel Oloffson. She was hooked.
After graduating, McCalla furthered her musical education in the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, the Rhiannon Giddens-fronted old-time string band, then released two self-produced solo albums, 2014’s Vari-Colored Songs, a tribute to the Harlem Renaissance’s Langston Hughes, and A Day For The Hunter, A Day For The Prey two years later. Both blend Haitian folk with the sounds of Louisiana, the state she has called home since 2010. Her third album, Capitalist Blues, was a leap forward, bringing in New Orleans soul and jazz. Or should that be Haitian soul and jazz?
“All those Haitian traditions have had a huge influence on New Orleans, and Breaking
The Thermometer gives me the chance to talk about that. I find it fascinating how much of that has been buried for so long. For more than 200 years, Haiti has been ostracised for claiming its independence. Haitian culture, and vodou in particular, has been stigmatised, vilified. Vodou, as a religion, is just about devotion. All the spirits are very human. Just learning about Fête Gede, for example, the crossroads between life and death, and how raunchy it is, so much sex and booze… of course that scared the shit out of the colonisers.”
And is that what she wants to do to listeners?
McCalla laughs. “They could just dance in a frenzied way.”
“Haitian culture has been stigmatised.” LEYLA McCALLA
APUB FULL of drunk Millwall fans is not, perhaps, the best place to try out unsteady fusions of folk and postrock. But in a rehearsal room above the Five Bells pub in New Cross, early in 2017, this is where caroline (the ‘c’ is written in lower case) made their first tentative steps. “If there was a match on, they’d get really pissed off and shout at us to fuck off,” remembers caroline’s Mike O’Malley. “The landlord told us, ‘No more of that raucous shit while we’re trying to watch football.’”
That “raucous shit” was heavily indebted to Mogwai, but the founding trio of O’Malley, Casper Hughes and Jasper Llewellyn saw a potential missed by many of the pub’s regulars. Gradually, the south London band swelled to an octet, taking their time over an eponymous debut album that surfaced earlier in 2022. Caroline are, though, a band whose music revels in the uncanny power of a slow build. “We like a long, iterative creative process,” admits Hughes. “We spend a lot of time self-analysing. It can be painful, protracted, stressful.”
Hughes and Llewellyn met at Manchester University where, alienated by a scene dominated by garage-rock and post-punk, they’d play “sadboy acoustic guitar” in their bedrooms. Relocating to London as post-grads, they recruited O’Malley, who’d performed traditional folk songs with Llewellyn as teens in their hometown of Lewes, and formulated the repetitive, meditative qualities that would define caroline. “I’d worry, Is this enough? Do I need to come up with other chords or a change?” says Hughes. “But it was so liberating. I used to DJ trance-like house and techno at university. This had a similar feeling.”
“We always felt quietly confident about what we were doing,” adds Llewellyn. “But at first we didn’t play shows. Our friends didn’t know we did this. We weren’t ambitious.” On the down-low, however, caroline’s evolution inched onwards. Amplifiers were swapped for acoustic instruments. Friends climbed aboard to add violin, clarinet, trumpet and percussion. Patiently, their minimal sketches blossomed into subtly affecting and occasionally cacophonic chamber-folk.
The unhurried pace of caroline’s development also created poignant new contexts for their songs. “I wrote my lyrics for Good Morning (Red) in 2017, when I was campaigning for Corbyn,” says Hughes of the song in which he sings, “How can I be happy in this world?/We’ll have to change it”. “It was a febrile time; it felt like there was a possibility for meaningful social change. When we perform that song now,
I scream those words in a way that’s quite desperate, and sad, and raw, because that hope feels extinguished.”
Shortly before the pandemic, caroline signed to Rough Trade, solidifying their hitherto vaporous line-up and beginning the work of sculpting their debut album, their characteristically cogitative process only intensified by lockdown. “It was quite obsessive and painful at points,” Hughes admits. “Sometimes I wish we could be the sort of group that could say, ‘Yeah, that’ll do’. But hopefully our process results in some good music.”
Stevie Chick
“We spend a lot of time self-analysing.” CASPER HUGHES