The Road To Haiti by Gage Averill

Gage Averill is a professor of history and culture at the University Of Toronto. He is the premier scholar on Haiti and the person responsible for curating the ALAN LOMAX IN HAITI music portion of the ALAN LOMAX IN HAITI boxset, writing the notes, and translating many of the songs. He will be talking on FORUM this morning, KQED radio, at 10 am PST....

David Katznelson, our producer, asked how I got involved in Haiti; probably the question I’ve been asked most over the last twenty plus years. After working for some years as a tenant organizer in low income housing projects and then driving a tractor for an apple orchard – all the while I was playing Irish and Latin music – I went back to school to get a BA in ethnomusicology in the early 1980s, and that led to a grant to pursue graduate studies. For a class assignment I analyzed the music of rara bands in Haiti, and became interested in pursuing rara as a dissertation subject. But my research grant to study rara in Haiti in 1986 was put on hold by the Fulbright Fellowships when the rebellion against the Duvalier dictatorship broke out. So my back-up project became a study of Haitian popular music, which would let me work primarily in the urban areas of Haiti. I left first for the Haitian community of Miami and then Haiti in 1987. I began a side career as a journalist of Haitian music, and wrote the column Haitian Fascination for 8 years in The Beat Magazine, but I also continued my research, traveling between Haiti and the overseas Haitian communities for much of a decade. Over the time that I’ve worked in Haiti, I’ve been an election observer for the Organization of American States, organized festivals, prepared radio shows, written liner notes for a score of albums. I’ve marched in a band at carnaval, played with rara groups, gigged with konpa bands, attended week-long Vodou ceremonies, and traveled over much of Haiti from Cap Haïtien to Pestel in the Southwest. My engagement with Haitian music and with so many generous and patient Haitian friends and colleagues has inspired me and transformed me in profound ways.

VOODOO: The Little Understood Religion

Scholar Lois Wilcken is the expert on Haitian Voodoo--literally writing the book on it. You can by the book here. Upon seeing the box set Alan Lomax In Haiti, Wilcken commented: Haiti, “the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere” according to a tired cliché, re-surfaces as the Pearl of the Antilles through Alan Lomax’s compelling and comprehensive 1930s collection. Gage Averill and the project team have reached across seven decades to mine Haiti’s precious cultural gems, polish them, and put them on display. Haitianists beware, we have a new item on our “must” list!

Here is an excerpt from Wilcken's book Drums Of Vodou:

Vodou, commonly knows as “voodoo,” is a widely discussed but little understood religion. In this book author Lois Wilcken discusses politics in Haiti, anti-Vodou campaigns, plus the religious and cultural context of Vodou. But the chief contribution of this landmark book lies in its presentation and analysis of the sacred music of Haiti. Guided by the great Haitian master drummer Frisner Augustin, the author reveals the sacred rhythms of spirit possession. This book appeals to a wide range of percussionists, Caribbean music enthusiasts, scholars, and those interested in Vodou or neo-African religions.

FREE TASTE #6 - VOLUME 6 - FLOWERS OF FRANCE

VOLUME 6 - FLOWERS OF FRANCE
ROMANCES, CANTICLES, AND CONTREDANSE

Without a doubt, what drew ethnographers to Haiti in the 1930s was the hope of encountering vigorous African traditions in the New World. Indeed, descendents of African slaves had preserved cultural expressions from African nations stretching from Angola through what is now Senegal. And yet the legacy of French colonization was also in evidence everywhere. Alan Lomax
encountered many of these French legacies, not just in the elite arts of urban Haitians, but in rural contredanses, in the canticles sung before Vodou ceremonies, and in children’s game songs in small towns around Haiti (see Volume 5, Pou Timoun-yo: Music By and For Children for examples of the latter). These vestiges of European expressive culture have not fared well in
the Haiti of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and some are extremely rare in Haiti today.

Most of the romances Lomax recorded, many of them by a group of musicians he called Louis and his Men (led by Louis Forvilice) are in archaic forms of French, or in a mix of archaic French and Haitian Kreyòl. Unfortunately, Lomax left many of these recordings untitled, and he left no
notes concerning the group or its songs. All in all, translating these songs proved to be extremely difficult, and I’ve had to leave many of them out and provide only skeletal lyrics for others.

Matinik performers dancing a form of contredanse, directed by a majè (major).

This volume also explores another European survival, the music of Haitian contredanse. These examples feature a contredanse ensemble called the Sosyete Viyolon (Violin Society) with a folk violin as the lead melodic instrument, backed by a small percussion ensemble. Folk fiddles are still to be found in some areas of Haiti (ethnomusicologist David Yih recorded an ensemble near Les Cayes that used one in the 1990s, and I have recorded contredanse ensembles that use a fif or wooden flute instead). The contredanse was an import into the French courts from English country dances, and it became a hugely popular dance in France of the 1700s. It incorporated a number of choreographic figures for group dancing, which were typically called out by a dancing master. These contredanses, popularized in the colonies, survived colonialism around the Caribbean and spawned a number of popular dances from the couples sections of the figures (méringue and danzón, for example).

Finally, the recordings conclude with a short set of cantiques from those performed at the start of a Vodou Seremoni at the temple of an ougan named Ti-Kouzen in Carrefour Dufort on Easter Friday. These were given no titles and there is no mention of them in Lomax’s journals, but they are haunting and lovely.

Please enjoy this taste from Volume 6
(it can take a few moments to upload...please be patient)

FREE TASTE #6 - Disc 6 - FLOWERS OF FRANCE

VOLUME 6 - FLOWERS OF FRANCE
ROMANCES, CANTICLES, AND CONTREDANSE

Without a doubt, what drew ethnographers to Haiti in the 1930s was the
hope of encountering vigorous African traditions in the New World. Indeed,
descendents of African slaves had preserved cultural expressions from African
nations stretching from Angola through what is now Senegal. And yet the
legacy of French colonization was also in evidence everywhere. Alan Lomax
encountered many of these French legacies, not just in the elite arts of
urban Haitians, but in rural contredanses, in the canticles sung before Vodou
ceremonies, and in children’s game songs in small towns around Haiti (see
Volume 5, Pou Timoun-yo: Music By and For Children for examples of the
latter). These vestiges of European expressive culture have not fared well in
the Haiti of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and some are extremely
rare in Haiti today.

Most of the romances Lomax recorded, many of them by a group of
musicians he called Louis and his Men (led by Louis Forvilice) are in
archaic forms of French, or in a mix of archaic French and Haitian Kreyòl.
Unfortunately, Lomax left many of these recordings untitled, and he left no
notes concerning the group or its songs. All in all, translating these songs
proved to be extremely difficult, and I’ve had to leave many of them out and

provide only skeletal lyrics for others.

Matinik performers dancing a form of contredanse, directed by a majè (major).

This volume also explores another European survival, the music of Haitian contredanse.
These examples feature a contredanse ensemble called the Sosyete Viyolon (Violin Society) with a folk violin as the lead melodic instrument, backed by a small percussion ensemble. Folk fiddles are still to be found in some areas of Haiti (ethnomusicologist David Yih recorded an ensemble
near Les Cayes that used one in the 1990s, and I have recorded contredanse ensembles that use a fif or wooden flute instead). The contredanse was an import into the French courts from English country dances, and it became a hugely popular dance in France of the 1700s. It incorporated a number of choreographic figures for group dancing, which were typically called out by a dancing master. These contredanses, popularized in the colonies, survived colonialism around the Caribbean and spawned a number of popular dances from the couples sections of the figures (méringue and danzón, for example).

Finally, the recordings conclude with a short set of cantiques from those performed at the start of a Vodou Seremoni at the temple of an ougan named Ti-Kouzen in Carrefour Dufort on Easter Friday. These were given no titles and there is no mention of them in Lomax’s journals, but they are haunting and lovely.

Please enjoy this taste from Volume 6
(it can take a few moments to upload...please be patient)

FRESH OFF THE PRESSES! THE BOX SETS HAVE ARRIVED!

Get your copy of ALAN LOMAX IN HAITI now! These are going fast, so get your copy today.

BUY BOX SET - $129.99 + shipping/handling:

BUY HAITI BOX SET

FREE TASTE # 5

The lives of most children in Haiti, especially those from the poorest classes, were not easy in the 1930s (nor are they now). With one of the hemisphere’s highest rates of maternal and infant mortality, as well as rampant childhood disease, the passage to adulthood in Haiti is fraught with danger. In the 1930s, yaws, a syphilitic disease of the skin, ravaged the country, and the scarcity of clean drinking water resulted in a variety of water-borne illnesses. Schooling, if it could be secured and paid for, was often cut short by the need to work. And because families of limited means often lived in small, cramped quarters, children grew up without much innocence concerning adult sexuality. Among the poorest of the poor, families that felt they couldn’t care
for one or more children often arranged with a wealthier relative or even a stranger to “adopt” the child as an unpaid household laborer, called a rèstavèk (from the French rester avec, to stay with). Although children in Haiti have always been dearly cherished, parenting regimens tended to be very strict, often employing repercussions as severe as corporal punishment (the use of
a cat-o’-nine-tails, called matinèt or rigwaz in Kreyòl, was common). These harsh realities of childhood resulted in the frank tone of many Haitian children’s songs, and yet there is also much joy in these songs, offering a glimpse into a world of play and creativity that is usually hidden from adult eyes.


These recordings explore the contradictory spaces of childhood: Boy Scout songs, gentle lullabies, fear-tinged songs of lougawou-s (werewolves) and child-eating witches, counting songs for instruction, game songs for passing rocks and splashing in water, round songs for circle dances, and songs that veer from the innocent and childlike to trespass on adult themes or betray an unfortunate familiarity with hardship.


Please enjoy the music from Volume 5 - Children's Songs

FREE TASTE - VOLUME 4

Volume 4
RARA: VODOU IN MOTION

Four majors marched together at the head of the band. Thomar danced along, crouching, yellow shirt, calling the band over his shoulder, the president at his side. The two coronels with their whips behind the four majors, their batons flashing in the sun. Behind them the vaxines, and behind them the mob, singing and dancing. Clouds of dust rising up from beneath their feet.

—Alan Lomax, field notes

Of the many elements of Haitian expressive culture, rara may be among the most difficult to describe and explain succinctly. Whereas the service of the saints (also known as Vodou) in Haiti is generally pursued in the home and in the ounfò (temple), in rara it is brought out into the public spaces of the streets, crossroads, and cemeteries. Taken on as a sacred promise to a lwa (god) or group of lwa, a rara band (bann rara) will be organized by a head (mèt or master, or perhaps a president) for a certain number of years: seven is typical, although many rara bands become permanent fixtures in their regions. The band is modeled on military and courtly or governmental hierarchies and engages in ceremonies to consecrate the band, rehearsals to develop its music, and then weekends of preparatory perambulations before embarking on an exhausting string of marches during the days leading up to Easter Sunday or Monday. Although its celebratory atmosphere and often ribald lyrics may not suggest a sacred purpose, the event is both sacred and profane.

Rara may have started during the colonial period as a French celebration called Carnaval Carême (Easter Carnaval), a week of celebration to end Lent and to lead into Easter; the practice of playing for patrons en route may be a holdover from the plantation-era practice of playing for colonial masters. Indeed, an early alternative name for rara, lwalwadi, may be a corruption of
“la loi di”, meaning “the law allows,” referring to the permission in the Code Noir of Napoleon for slave celebrations of this nature.

NOTES FROM A RADA CEREMONY (from Alan's Journal)

It is Nov. 1st...and the monolithic ALAN LOMAX IN HAITI boxset is almost here (Nov. 17th).  One of the components of the boxset is a transcription of Alan's Haitian journal edited (with wonderful notes) by Alan's niece Ellen Harold.  The following is a page from his actual journal which features his notes on a  Rada ceremony at Kay Moïse (Moise’s House), in which Alan describes the movement around the peristile by the devotees, with the gestures made.  Alan also includes some ritual diagrams of the three Rada drums (boula, segon, and manman), as they might appear on a vèvè.  All of this is described in detail in the liner notes of the boxset....

ALAN'S REPORT TO THE LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS

On December 21st, 1936, Alan Lomax sent a report to Herbert Putnam, the Librarian Of Congress, about his first impressions after arriving in Haiti.  This quote is published here for the first time...

"I have looked about enough to be sure this is the richest and most virgin field I have ever worked in. I hear fifteen or twenty different street cries from my hotel window each morning while I dress. The men sing satirical ballads as they load coffee on the docks. Among the upper-class families many of the old French ballads have been preserved. The meringue, the popular dance of polite society here, is quite unknown in America and has its roots in the intermingling of the Spanish and French folk-traditions. The orchestras of the peasants play marches, bals, blues, meringues. Then mama and papa and kata tambours officiate at as many kinds of dances ⎯ the congo, the Vodou, and the mascaron. Then there seem to be innumerable cante-fables [oral tales punctuated by songs or rhymes performed by the audience]. Each of these categories comprise, so I am informed, literally hundreds of melodies ⎯ French, Spanish, African, mixtures of the three. The radio and the sound movie and the phonograph record have made practically no cultural impression, so far as I can discover, except among the petit-bourgeois of the coastal cities. And American jazz is hardly known here except among the rich who have visited America. Composition, by which I mean folk composition, is still very active. So I think I can say that unless a piece of sky falls on my head, this trip will mean some beautiful records for the Library’s collection."

THE HAITI BOX SET - FREE TASTE #3

As a former French colony, Haiti inherited the European celebration called Carnaval, which emerged in medieval times as a period of excessive indulgence before the abstinence of Lent. Coming in the dead of winter as a harbinger of spring, Carnaval celebrates eating, drinking, dressing in costume, and all forms of transformation, transgression, playful obscenity and humor. (including political humor, piking fun at the church and state and the heirarchy of social relations)


Click on the text box below to enjoy the music of Carnaval:
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The Haiti Box Set - Free Taste #2

*As Gage Averil writes in the beginning of his notes to the second volume within the boxset*


"During his initial month in Haiti, Alan Lomax fell in love with the rough-hewn music of small ensembles that he called malinoumbas groups (sometimes called manoubas or manoumba) after the name of the large boxlike "thumb piano" on which a player sits and plucks metal tongues suspended over a sound hole. Along with malinoumba, these rustic ensembles typicaly feature one- or two-string instruments (a guitar and/or a four-string banza banjo sometimes a twa or trois, a stringed instrument equivalent to the Cuban tres, with three courses of double strings, a tchatcha (gourd rattle, similar to the Cuban maracas) a tanbou (barrel drum played by hands), bwa (percussion sticks comparable to the Cuban claves) and sometimes an accordion.

These same ensembles go by many names; sometimes they're simply called ti bann (little ensembles) or twoubadou groups."

Click on the text box below to enjoy the music of the Troubadors:
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A Rara Band’s Search For Home Pt. 2

...but there was still the problem of defining rara - and more specifically finding footage that could bring its origins to life. A year and a half of archival research had provided some clues: Maya Deren’s Divine Horseman includes some gorgeous shots of rara dancing and vaksin playing.  Anthropologists George Eastman Simpson and Melville and Francis Herskovitz documented both a few stunning processions, as well as many of the rites and rituals of village life from which the ritual or rara sprang.  Other leads were more elusive: we heard a rumor from a scholar that Katherine Dunham had filmed rara’s in her graduate studies research. 

After a year and a half of emails, phone calls and written requests, we were finally given access to the footage only to discovered that 1) while Dunham was a genius at writing, dance, and scholarship, she wasn’t particularly gifted at holding a camera steady, and 2) she did not in fact ever film more than a few seconds of barely-on-screen rara musicians.  

Gage Avril, the editor of this box set, first tipped me off to the Lomax’s footage of rara (which the Lomax Archive was generous and helpful in providing).  When I watched the footage I was immediately struck by the many remarkable paradoxes. The first was that the footage, shot in 1936, is in full color!  (In fact, it became a challenge to convince audiences that the footage was as old as it is.)

The second paradox was that while it was one of the earliest recordings of rara in the field - it was also largely faked.  As I’d learned from Dr. Avrill, the rara was staged for the camera, outside of traditional rara season, and within the confines of a private compound or “lakou.” The problem was that there were no public raras to film, since the local Catholic Church was in the midst of one of its periodic vodou purges, in which public ceremonies were banned, drums and ritual objects were burned, and by some accounts, vodou priests were occasionally killed.   
So the footage didn’t have the usual chaos or a rara procession, where its nearly impossible to figure out what’s going on or where to look..  Instead a few musicians, dancers and singers made few orderly marches and turns, dancing, jumping and flailing arms along the way. (Lomax’s team could record film or audio, but not both at the same time, so it was impossible to tell which songs were actually being played).  Yet ironically, there was something in the staged exuberance of the footage that communicates the spirit of rara better than almost any footage I’d found. It was as if, knowing that the audio wasn’t being recorded, the musicians were giving the camera a silent charade of what rara was supposed to sound like.  When we’d show the footage to audiences in rough-cut screenings, they always love the clips, and comment on its infectious energy.  It ended up being one of the most compelling documents of rara we’d found.
In the end, just as it was impossible to define rara, we realized it was impossible to find footage which could show what a “true” rara looked like.   The best we could do was to look to incredible documents like Lomax’s films for flickering hints about the origins, the meanings, and the spirit of the music which is still moving and electrifying audiences decades later and thousands of miles away.   

A Rara Band’s Search For Home Pt. 1

A Rara band’s search for home, a filmmaker’s search for archival footage

Jeremy Robins, along with Magali Damas, have created an amazing documentary, The Other Side Of The Water, following a group of young immigrants who take an ancient music from the hills of Haiti and reinvent it on the streets of Brooklyn.  Alan Lomax's recordings of the Rara Bands he came upon during his trip in Haiti will be found on Vol. 4 in the upcoming Box Set with film footage as well.  Robins has been kind enough to contribute to our blog (go HERE to see the trailer to his Documentary)...

"I first heard that Alan Lomax’s had shot film in Haiti in the 30’s back in 2005, while I was in the middle of quest to find every scrap of archival footage of the style of Haitian processional music called “rara”.

Along with my co-producer Magali Damas, I was creating the documentary titled “The Other Side of the Water” about the 20-year journey of a rara band in Brooklyn NY.  The project was an attempt to tell the story of the enormous but often hidden Haitian community of Brooklyn, and more broadly to explore of one of those amazing New York subcultures; how it survives, evolves, and relates to its home culture.

One of the biggest challenges in making a film about rara music in America was trying to answer the basic question “What is Rara?”  A percussionist in Prospect Park described it as a walking vodou ceremony; a scholar friend defined it as subtle

 and intelligently coded political and social commentary utilized by Haiti’s disenfranchised poor; the mother of the band’s drummer described rara as a vulgar, drunken, musical mob.

  (My favorite answer is that it’s all of the above, all at once.)  

If we were going to try to establish a working definition of such a complex and contradictory ritual, we would need a lot of strong archival clips.

For our current day footage (over 300 hours of MiniDV and DVCPro tapes), we filmed roughly a year in the life of the rara-band-in-exile, following characters through basement vodou temples, underground economies, and the ground-shaking processions through darkness of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.  
We also found troves of home-movies shot by the band’s fans since its founding in 1990.  This stack of beat-up VHS and Hi-8 tapes traced the band’s jubilant creation one afternoon after Aristide’s first election, through the politicization of the band during the “Haitian-American Civil Rights Movement”, through the band’s own internal coup – when young hip-hop inspired musicians arrived from Haiti with a vastly different conception of the music. In each stage, hundreds of years of history, stigma, politics and identity are battled out in the haunting sounds of tin kone horns and bamboo vaksins.  
But there was still the problem of defining rara - and more specifically finding footage that could bring its origins to life ......."

A Vodou Ceremony Pt. 2

A Vodou Ceremony Pt. 2

Possession by the Loi

...then a violent and frenzied dance begins — the hips and shoulders shaking, wiggling, shivering, and vibrating in a fashion impossible for a person in a normal physical state. Later Gran Erzulie enters into the body of a young girl who had seemed before to be made out of sections of willow branches; a completely soft young adolescent face over a body so pliant and fine that it could not stand straight but let every bone take its own separate angle, the whole body akimbo. 

Now this pliant body grew suddenly old, the legs were bent and bowed inward with rheumatism and the belly was sucked up with pain and fatigue under the withered breast. A continual low murmur of groans and whines came from the twisted lips as the other dancers jostled her.

Then the drummer, Ciceron [Marseille], whom I believe carries all the loi in his thin, old hunched shoulders that make the mama drum growl and roar, called to the loi to dance, and Simbi and Gran Erzulie seemed to be shaking themselves to pieces, the first in his male and the second in her old female fashion. This dance went on growing more and more violent until the mamaloi called for a mason, which is the signal for the departure of spirits. At the end of this dance, both Simbi and Gran Erzulie swooned separately on the floor in each others’ arms, those two young bodies curved against one another in a sort of trance of exhaustion. All this time, of course, there had been other loi in the women present, but the loi themselves, the inspired women, had given place way and precedence to the two I have described. Presently, as the singing recommenced, the body that had held Simbi dragged itself off into a corner and went to sleep with its head in its arms The habitation of Gran Erzulie, however, only leaned against the wall for a few moments and soon was back in the dance again.

A VODOU CEREMONY Pt. 1

While Alan Lomax was in Haiti he kept a very detailed journal of his travels, recordings, findings and feelings.  The journal will be transcribed as its own book in the upcoming boxset ALAN LOMAX IN HAITI, due out in November on Harte Recordings.  It was transcribed by his niece, Ellen Harold.  For the first time ever, the public will be able to read his journal. The following is the first part of his description of a vodou ceremony...

A Vodou Ceremony Pt. 1

Possession by the Loi

The Mombo and her assistant were in no hurry about lighting the candles on the altar from the oil lamp that is kept burning always on the floor of the assembly room. The doors were kept shut, or partially so, during the lighting of the candles, in one of which four young women who are being prepared for baptism participated.
At last, however, the Mombo began to dance. She whirled slowly about the rooms a few times, swaying and bowing, her feet as precise as a première ballerina. She made libation before each drum. Presently, after she had danced for ten minutes, and she is by far the most graceful and charming dancer I had so far seen, the others began. Each one in turn kissed the ground before the drums, the others singing, the drums beating the Jean Valou rhythm, and then bowed and kissed the ground before the Mombo's feet. 

There was the usual stately and warm handshaking, curtseying, twirling, and embrasse-ing. A few of us went into the chapel room on the left side and kissed the ground before the three candles before the altar, touching first our hearts and then the earth with our index fingers. A kiss before another candle on the ground at the right wall, and before a square basin of water at the rear (this is Damballa).
Back in the main room again the drums were beginning to pull the loi into the hearts of the worshippers. A tall young woman in white with a red head rag and a loose and silly face was Simbi. A possessed person (generally) begins by staggering about the room on one leg, almost but never quite falling into the arms of the spectators. The motion is that of a person walking along the iron of a railroad track. Then a violent and frenzied dance begins....(to be continued)

Tracking Through Haiti: The 1937 Lomax Recordings in a New Millennium

The following post is from Matthew Barton, the Curator of Recorded Sound at the Library Of Congress at the National Audio Visual Center in Virginia.  Here he discusses the discs used by Alan and Elizabeth Lomax to record the sounds and music they experienced on their Haitian journey....

One interesting aspect of the experience was that since the discs were copied in the order they were recorded, the whole field trip was relived, in a sense.

In one of the first recordings from this field trip, Alan Lomax can be heard expressing his doubts about his recording apparatus during a microphone test conducted somewhere in Port au Prince, Haiti. I heard his remarks on the first of some 300 aluminum discs that Library of Congress sound engineer Brad McCoy transferred digitally while I took notes from the other side of the turntable for nearly a month several years ago. The aluminum disc system employed for these Haitian recordings was indeed cumbersome and difficult, and this would be the last major field trip on which Alan employed it, switching soon thereafter to the new portable acetate disc cutters that made quieter and more sensitive recordings.   

Clumsy as the old system was, Alan and Elizabeth Lomax had nevertheless made it work in an astounding array of unusual recording situations in the days from Christmas, 1936 through Easter, 1937 in Haiti.  From lone singers to full dance orchestras; from the more polite steps of Port au Prince society to the high-energy rhythms of Mardi Gras drummers; from church services to voodoo ceremonies, they pushed the equipment to the limit. The twelve-inch aluminum discs they used for most of these recordings could only hold about five minutes of sound comfortably, but often, they simply had to hold more. On many discs, Brad and I saw that they had allowed the recording head to keep tracking to within barely an inch of the hole in the center of the disc. This reduced the fidelity and created untold technical headaches more than sixty years after the recordings were made, but in this way, a few seconds, perhaps even a full minute more of priceless documentary recording was accomplished

For more than seventy years, these recordings have lain in obscurity. I doubt if even a single scholar has listened to them all. They are not the only field recordings to have languished for decades, but I wonder if any field recording trip of this scope and importance ever sat on the shelf for so long. The recordings had little or no direct effect in their day, but they at least set a precedent and may have helped facilitate other important fieldwork undertaken for the Library of Congress over the next several years, including Melville and Francis Herskovits’s Brazilian recordings and Henrietta Yurchenco’s Mexican recordings. Now at last, they can reach Haiti and the rest of the world, and I’m very glad to no longer be one of the only people to have heard these precious discs.  

**The image in this post is of a disc sleeve of one of Alan's recordings including his notes.

Haiti Trip Ephemera Pt. 1

From the vaults of the Library Of Congress comes this interesting piece: a carbon copy of one of Alan Lomax's expense sheets regarding the Haiti trip. 

....there are more items like this one to come!

“How the Haiti Project Came About” Pt. 2

Anna L. Wood, daughter of Alan Lomax, writes:

...a separate Haiti series was clearly called for, although we knew that demanding sound engineering and cultural/ linguistic translation issues were involved which would make it a complex — and costly — undertaking of long duration. Borrowing funds from other budgets, we began by making faithful, high quality transfers from the original aluminum discs to DAT. We also enlisted the ethnomusicologist, Gage Averill, a specialist in Caribbean music, to re-catalog, compile, and annotate the recordings. Gage, who had just begun teaching at NYU at the time and was about to become a father, was nonetheless eager to listen to the whole lot, and soon came up with a thematic scheme for nine CDs, and over the next couple of years, sequences and notes for two.
Other projects pushed Haiti into the background, because three years later, sophisticated sound restoration technologies, capable of removing the hisses, pops, and crackles that nearly drowned out the recordings, were offered to us at an affordable price by the Magic Shop, our mastering studio.
Meanwhile, we at the Association for Cultural Equity had embarked on a full-scale effort to disseminate and repatriate digital copies of Alan Lomax’s media documentation to their places of origin. Thus, rather than resurrect only those tracks selected for publication on CD (a mere fifteen percent of the collection), we elected to restore and pre-master the entire fifty hours, with the intention of repatriating them to Haiti. We would also make copies available to the Library of Congress and the Schomburg Center and offer samples of all tracks on the Association for Cultural Equity’s online catalog.
Enter David Katznelson of Harte Recordings. Jeffrey Greenberg brought Dave to us a couple of years ago to discuss issuing hidden treasures from the Lomax collections. We considered several possibilities, among them Haiti. Dave had been an A&R man at Warner Brothers, immersed in rock and pop, so it was a happy surprise when he offered to embrace the Haiti project and produce an attractively designed box set.
Dave’s enthusiasm for all aspects of the project reignited our own. Gage Averill and his Haitian colleagues returned to the demanding task of selecting and identifying songs, tracking down the meanings of obscure and obsolete forms of Kreyòl, transcribing and translating song lyrics, and writing notes. Ellen Harold began the months’ long process of transcribing and editing Alan Lomax’s handwritten diaries and letters. At the same time, work on the box supported our preparations for repatriating the full collection to Haiti.
In every respect, we wish this endeavor to be an hommage to the Haitian people. It is also a tribute to Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress for having had the foresight to undertake and support this project, which recognized African American culture as a distinctive network of affiliations extending far beyond the boundaries of the United States, and to and from Africa.
Anna L. Wood, Ph.D. is Director of the Association for Cultural Equity and the Alan Lomax Collections in New York City.

HAITI IN THE NEWS: Bill Clinton Named As Special Envoy On Haiti

The story is here:

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton will be named a U.N. special envoy on Haiti this week, sources close to the United Nations tell The Cable.

"I've been following this country for more than three decades," Clinton told the Miami Herald. "I fell in love with it 35 years ago when Hillary and I came here. I think I understand what its shortcomings have been but I've always believed most of its problems were not as some people suggested; cultural, mystical. I think they were subject to misgovernment. They were either oppressed or neglected and they never had the benefit of consistently being rewarded for effort in education, in agriculture, in industry and in any area. And, therefore, they were forced to become incredible, if you will, social entrepreneurs and to make the most of daily life... Tell the world Haiti is a good place to invest'."

“How the Haiti Project Came About” Pt. 1

Anna L. Wood, daughter of Alan Lomax, writes:

The multifaceted Alan Lomax in Haiti stems from Lomax’s original work in the Caribbean in the mid–1930s and has been a long time coming. It spans the history of sound recording and playback technology of the last 75 years, and it is thanks to progress in this field that we can now listen in to Haitian worlds that no longer exist. Such advances make realizable the humanistic goals of cultural equity and cultural feedback that Alan Lomax ardently espoused, so that it is now possible to bring a generous selection from this rich collection to the public, and to return it whole to the Haitian people.

In the 1970s Alan Lomax spent several months at the Library of Congress going through the early recordings of African American and Afro-Caribbean folk song that he and his father, John A. Lomax, had made in the 1930s and ‘40s. The Black Pride Movement was still in full swing, and it was Lomax’s plan to bring to the movement an encyclopedic collection of what he regarded as among the fundamental sources of black culture and history in the Americas.

Alan mapped out a series of twelve LPs with the working title Treasury of Black Folksong (later Deep River of Song), which included music from eight states and the Bahamas — but which did not include Haiti, where he had worked in 1936–37, probably because it was acoustically challenging. As it happened, publication of Deep River was delayed until the late 1990s — fortunately so, in that acoustic science had by then leapt into the digital age. Whilst at the Library of Congress transferring sound for this series, Lomax Archive Sound Archivist Matthew Barton took a look at the Haiti collection and was astounded to find fifty hours of recordings — some 1,500 items — and hundreds of pages of field notes and correspondence that had scarcely been touched.

A separate Haiti series was clearly called for...(to be continued)

WELCOME TO OUR BLOG

Folklorist Alan Lomax worked in Haiti from December of 1936 until April of 1937, documenting music and ritual at the behest of his colleague and friend, Zora Neale Hurston, and under the auspices of the Library Of Congress.  He arrived just two years after the brutal 19-year occupation by the US Marines, when resentment against Americans ran high.  In spite of this. Haiti opened its arms to a number of talented and highly distinguished US artists and anthropologists, who were drawn by the island's distinctive culture, its striking musical and visual arts, and its people--as well as its fascination (though mostly sensationalist) accounts of Vodou, a Haitian amalgam of religious beliefs and practices derived from West Africa.  While there, Lomax recorded fifty hours of music, made copious notes, diagrams, and drawings, and even shot some color film.  These have never before seen the light of day.

Harte Recordings, together with the Alan Lomax Estate and with the collaboration of the Library Of Congress and the Association for Cultural Equity, will be releasing a box set in the Fall chronicling Alan's journey into Haiti.  This massive project will include 10 CDs of music, Alan's trip journals, a reproduced map that Alan personally annotated, a book of liner notes and essays and the film footage he shot.

When the project is completed, the Association for Cultural Equity will return a full set of digitally restored, pre-mastered and catalogued recordings to the Haitian people as part of its Caribbean Repatriation Program.

This blog will chronicle the putting together of the box set, the state-of-the-art technology used in mastering the album, period photos and ephemera, premiers of the actual music--never before heard--and previews from the album notes and articles, as well as discoveries made by the Producers while researching all that is HAITI.

ENJOY!!!!

This is a section of the actual map used by Alan during his stay in Haiti.

100% Donation - 10 Songs - Alan Lomax in Haiti