The Daily Swarm

By Peter Shapiro

Ever since the earthquake on January 12th, you’ve heard plenty of media bloviating about Haiti’s poverty, dysfunction and “voodoo”, but precious little about the rich cultural life that made life in this star-crossed country bearable. Despite the grinding reality of life in Haiti even before the earthquake, the music that has existed here since at least the beginning of the 20th century is among the most joyous, melodic dance music to be found anywhere in the world.

Due to its unique geographical location (it shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic and is within spitting distance of Cuba) and its colonial history (it was once the richest of all the European colonies and had an enormous slave population that maintained a very close connection to Africa), Haiti’s music has always been syncretic. Haitian music has been colored and shaped by jazz, Cuban boleros and guarachas, Domincan merengue, calypso, and the African percussion that characterizes the practice of vodou.

The rustic nature of early Haitian music can best be heard on the magnificent 10-CD Alan Lomax in Haiti: Recordings for the Library of Congress (http://www.thehaitibox.blogspot.com), a collection of wonderfully evocative recordings made in 1936 and 1937 of vodou and church ceremonies, Boy Scouts singing plaintive folk songs, and stately clarinet-led orchestras learning how to swing.

Modern Haitian music started to take shape in the mid-1950s when Nemours Jean-Baptiste created a new style of music called compas direct that blended the Haitian méringue with the Dominican merengue and Cuban mambo. An accordion and subtle cowbell rhythm propelled Nemour’s compas with a lovely trade-wind lilt.

Beginning in 1957, Nemours engaged in a decade-long rivalry with an old compatriot, saxophonist Wébert Sicot, who had developed his own brand of compass that hewed more closely to mambo. This epic beef has been immortalized in Creole as the “epòk polemik Nemou ak Siko”.

In the late 60s “mini-jazz” bands, influenced by The Beatles and French yéyé girls, introduced guitars to compas and made the music even more of a melting pot. Chief among these younger bands were the remarkable Tabou Combo, who moved to New York in 1971 and have ever since created utterly joyous fusions of Port au Prince and the Big Apple: “Inflacion” is a smoking collision between compas and Nuyorican salsa with one of the great fuzz guitar intros; the group’s huge 1974 hit, “New York City” is a swirl of accordions, salsa percussion, and clipped guitars coloring a tale of immigrant Big Apple hardship – an expatriate “Livin’ for the City”; 1982’s Bolero is a nine-minute hip shake that seamlessly incorporates portions of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message”, Spoonie Gee and the rap from Indeep’s “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life”.

Although not quite the force of nature that Tabou Combo is, other compas artists like Coupé Cloué and Les Shleu nevertheless create utterly lovely music that is perfect for a hot, humid night.

The fact that many of the compas artists had connections with the Duvaliers (the father and son dictators who ran the country into the ground and terrorized Haitians through their army of loyal thugs, the Tontons Macoutes) and the lack of new-fangled technology led some groups to delve back into roots music, specifically the ra-ra music of vodou rites. This heavily percussive music is at the heart of Boukman Eksperyans’ Carnival anthem “Kèm Pa Sote” as well as the ra-ra rap of Rara Machine.