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