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.