FEATURE: Spotlight: Leyla McCalla — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Leyla McCalla

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I am going to go back a year or so…

before I come up to date with interviews with the remarkable Leyla McCalla. She is an extraordinary artist that everyone should know about. Maybe you do already know about her. Now a successful solo artist, she formerly played with the GRAMMY-winning band, Chocolate Drops. In terms of genre, she can be placed somewhere before Folk and Bluegrass, though that might be too niche or definitive. I think that her music is far more expansive and genre-less as that. I want to actually head back to 2022. That is where Leyla McCalla was speaking about then-new album, Breaking the Thermometer. Holler. spotlighted an amazing and compelling Americana (so many genres described depending on the interview) artist. We hear how eclectic she is. In terms of her sounds and where her music emanates and originates from:

“While country music remains stubbornly wedded to a narrow set of aesthetic practices, Americana has often taken a more open-ended approach. What began as a rootsier alternative to the mainstream has expanded in recent years to include a vast swath of different sounds and styles, in the process becoming much more inclusive of voices that country music has historically marginalized.

For Leyla McCalla — a singer and multi-instrumentalist whose bonafides include recording and touring with The Carolina Chocolate Drops and co-founding Our Native Daughters with Rhiannon Giddens, Allison Russell and Amythyst Kiah — these are welcome changes. In her solo work, McCalla is as apt to draw from trad jazz and zydeco as from folk and old-time, treating her cello and tenor banjo as portals to vastly different musical worlds. The daughter of Haitian immigrants and human rights activists, McCalla also draws deeply from Haitian folk music, taking inspiration from styles like rara and twoubadou and frequently singing in Creole.

On Breaking the Thermometer, her assured fourth LP, McCalla traces a fragmented history of Haiti, beginning in the present and working backwards. A companion of sorts to a theater performance commissioned by Duke University — who acquired the archives of Radio Haiti, the first independent radio station in Haiti, in 2016 — the album weaves voice recordings from new and historical interviews into traditional songs and original compositions.

The result is multilingual melange that offers an evocative and layered interrogation of identity, belonging and the freedoms that we too often take for granted. Holler spoke with McCalla about her creative process, the timeliness of her message and how she learned to embrace the different genre labels people put on her music.

Let’s talk about the title of the album, Breaking the Thermometer, which I understand takes its name from a proverb. Why did that resonate with you?

Sean Dominique, who was the director of Radio Haiti until he was assassinated in 2000, used that metaphor to describe the role of the independent press in a free society. He was saying that the press is the thermometer of the people. You can crack down on the press, you can repress freedom of speech, but it won’t hide the fever — it won’t fix any of the underlying problems. I love that proverb, because I feel like it sums up the research I was doing on Radio Haiti and also speaks to the human rights violations and attacks on democracy that continue to happen in Haiti and around the world.

Why did you feel like the story of Radio Haiti was important to tell at this particular moment?

In the United States, we tend to think of ourselves as immune from the struggles with the Democratic process that have afflicted places like Haiti. We like to think of ourselves as very far away from things that happen in so-called “shithold countries” — to use a phrase that we’re all familiar with. But if the Trump years taught us anything, it’s that we’re not. We need to recognize that we’re not immune from losing our freedom of speech or otherwise having our civil rights violated, and I feel that the story of Radio Haiti helps us to see our vulnerabilities as well as our strength as people.

There are stories of incredible suffering on the album as well as moments of joy and hope. Why was it important for you to tell both sides of this story?

There hasn’t been a lot of space for nuance in U.S. media and the Western imagination. In the early part of the 20th century, Hollywood films depicted voodoo — which I feel is the ultimate expression of Haitian spirituality — as “black magic”, something evil and bad. Then during the AIDS epidemic in the 80s, the CDC said that there were “Four H’s” that increased your risk of contracting HIV: hemophiliacs, heroin addicts, homosexuals and Haitians. Throughout its history, Haiti has been subject to a misinformation campaign that’s really tied up in racism. In the last 10 years, I’ve been part of a movement of people in New Orleans who are trying to acknowledge the Haitian roots of a lot of our cultural traditions here. Haiti is a big part of U.S. history and continues to be, but we never think of it that way. I also just think that Haiti is beautiful in an extremely nuanced way, in the same way that the United States is beautiful in a nuanced way. There is so much activism and resistance happening at every level of society, and I find that fascinating.

How did you approach turning these historical records into songs?

It’s been a super intuitive process of listening to the material and pulling out the elements that are interesting to me. Sometimes it takes the form of actual music recordings, and other times it’s just the sound of someone’s voice or a particular phrase that catches my attention. I’m not a fluent Haitian creole speaker, so I’ve often had to listen over and over again and really work through what was being said. I’d basically take what I heard and what I felt like I could play along with on my instruments, and that became the basis for the songs. It’s been a lot of experimenting and feeling the natural curves of the music.

One thing I find interesting about this album is how much it pushes against and expands the sonic boundaries of what is considered Americana. Is that something you set out to do?

For me, making music is very intuitive. I wasn’t thinking, I want to expand what Americana is. Honestly, I find it remarkable that this music is considered Americana, and I think that’s more reflective of the times than it is necessarily of the music. Genre lines seem to be getting blurrier, and there are also strategic things that the industry is doing to make the listenership more inclusive. They know that more people need to see themselves in this music, and that means it has to include more than just white guys with guitars. I feel like I still think like a folk musician, even if I’m using electric guitars and a drumset and evolving to a much bigger sound. That's the heart of where we’re coming from, and maybe being so inspired by different folk traditions and traditions in Haiti is what makes it Americana. The other thing is, people will just call your music whatever they want to call it, and I’m coming around to the idea that it’s all good. Maybe none of it completely tells the story of what your music is, but that’s okay — none of it is wrong. I guess my thing is like, if I can fit into your categories, isn't that a good thing?”.

I am going to come to a couple of reviews for Leyla McCalla’s new album, Sun Without the Heat. KLOF chatted with McCalla about her most personal album to date. I am quite new to her music, though I would really recommend it to everyone. She is an artist that you definitely need to know about and have on your playlist. One does not need to know about Bluegrass, Americana or Folk to appreciate the wonderful Leyla McCalla:

“McCalla’s previous outings have embraced Haitian folk music, Latin licks, Creole swing and the nostalgic old-time magic of New Orleans. She’s not been averse to some revved up rock riffs either. Her songs never flinch from reality, hardship or anxiety despite their heartwarming vocals and honey-laced melodies. Sun Without the Heat is perhaps McCalla’s most emphatic album yet, both musically and lyrically. Full of sensual ecstasy, twangy strums and hip-rolling dances, it’s nourished by African roots music but often glides into a mystic herbal haze. Explaining her narrative approach to this project, McCalla says, “I always look to writers and poets, to philosophers and thinkers for inspiration, to help wrap my head around stuff. My friend jackie sumell runs a social sculpture project called The Solitary Gardens in New Orleans, highlighting solitary confinement in US prisons, especially at Angola in Louisiana. I told her I was thinking of songs about the overwhelm of life and she gave me this book called Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. It’s basically about black feminist lessons learned from marine mammals. I’m naturally existentialist so I’m always going, like, why are we here? That book helped me see myself and the challenges in our society, the devastation of this planet, the separation from ourselves in nature. I also read Liberated to the Bone by Susan Raffo. She talks about the original wounds of our society – colonisation, genocide, taking land from people and using the ‘colour’ line to justify it all. All these things resonated as I’ve been studying Haitian history for years. This was the storm of research that went into writing the album.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Christopher Scheurich

McCalla’s symbolism is kept simple, yet her songs can embody both joy and suffering. “It comes from trying not to mince words, trying to be specific and not confused about what’s coming through. Sometimes it appears in more figurative language, but this record came out as quite prayerful. A lot of these songs were written in the studio, I arrived with some words here or a verse there, but didn’t know the gaps. There’s a few phrases adapted from other writers, including Frederick Douglass’s poetry from the 1850s.” One source for the new songs was Duke Ellington, whose Far East Suite inspired the stunning track Tree. “I’d been listening to Mount Harissa from that album, trying to remake it with words. Tree is about a woman who feels unloved and turns herself into a tree, isolating herself. I wanted to liberate this woman, maybe myself, from feeling that way. And to push it musically to the edge, make it a little scary. Women are powerful! And trees have these incredible root systems, they’re connected to all of life. They host life.” McCalla came into this album hoping to get an Afrofuturistic angle on the diasporic music that’s been in her mind. “I had some highlife things on the guitar, I was also mining West African grooves and banjo lines. The last album was so much about Haiti and its ancient rhythms, many of which derive from African drumming traditions. It’s not something I hear a lot of in the ‘folk’ world, maybe more in a global music context.” McCalla’s drummer, Shawn Myers, is well-versed in diasporic styles of music, notably from Haiti and Brazil. He plays a key role in building the album’s energy and healing frequencies. McCalla also credits producer Maryam Qudus with ideas and choices about guitar textures. “I played her a lot of music I appreciate from the 60s, or stuff made to sound like that. I love fuzzy trebly guitars and Maryam had lots of pedals and studio tricks.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Christopher Scheurich

The stark and moving Give Yourself A Break has some celestial plucking from guitarist Nahum Zdybel. It’s a song tribute to McCalla’s late brother, written from varied perspectives. “I used to call my brother and ask him for advice, or vent to him about what was going on. He was always gentle with me, never judgmental or reproachful. I imagined the song as a lullaby and thought about my daughter while writing it. I wondered what my brother would tell me while I’m parenting this child? It became unclear whether it was my brother singing to me, or me singing to my daughter. Or even my daughter singing to herself. Who knows? I was thinking about the impermanence of life. Give yourself a break while you’re here on this planet. We weren’t born to be just suffering and reckoning with our decisions all the time. We have to rest and allow ourselves some space.” In her media notes for the album, McCalla says she wanted to write a song that could’ve been sung at marches during the civil rights era. The record’s closing cut, I Want To Believe, is that song, a hopeful hymnal backed by the dignified richness of cello and piano. “I Want To Believe came about when I was thinking of the 60s activist Fannie Lou Hamer and the modern BLM protests,” she says. “Then you look at what’s happening at Columbia University right now where students have set up on the grounds, saying they won’t leave until the school divests itself of Israeli institutions that profit from apartheid and genocide. When I think about my life comparatively I’m glad to be in 2024 and not 1963. There has been progress made but there’s more to come. I think of it as a circle, or a spiral, it’s not a linear path. We can never rest on our laurels and say we’ve solved racism.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Christopher Scheurich

McCalla is among an incredible generation of black female artists in the UK, US, South Africa and elsewhere. Naming some, she recalls, “I met Matana Roberts when I was a cocktail waitress at a venue she played. To me she’s like a friend, an elder, a hero, an amazing thinker. She gave me one of the original transcripts of her Coin Coin project that I found in a house-moving box recently. It’s like a piece of treasure. I saw Aja Monet perform this year at the Big Ears festival in Knoxville, Tennessee. Kadhja Bonet is the little sister of my friend Bria who plays viola in my band. I feel part of this incredible web of black artistry. And yet it’s like we need more spaces to connect more directly. There has to be an opening for that. It is different to interact with a black woman’s work for me. I feel like I understand where they’re coming from. I don’t think that’s projection, I think it’s experience.” Away from music, McCalla has been busy in her garden. “I just planted so many seeds and I’m really praying it all works out how I’ve imagined,” she says, laughing. “I’m trying to do a wildflower sanctuary for bees and for tracking pollinators. Then I have tomatillos, basil, Thai basil, sweet peppers called Jimmy Nardello’s, some eggplants, bush beans. I’m a real crazy person, I have a garden at home but also a community plot. I got really obsessed about the health food movement in my early twenties. I was a waitress at this vegan and raw food restaurant in the East Village called Caravan Of Dreams. So I was always into cooking healthily and learning about it. When the pandemic hit I got even more into fermented food, sourdough bread and catering at home. I went all in. That’s when my gardening really took off and I learned about things like soil health too. I’ve been away travelling for a week, so I’m in the ‘missing my kids’ part of the cycle. But I love cooking for the family, I’m a real homebody”.

Such a wonderful artist, SPIN shared their take on the magnificent Sun Without the Heat. This is an album that everyone needs to hear. One of the most powerful and memorable that I have heard this year. Even though I am quite new to Leyla McCalla, I am going to follow her and see where she heads next. The New York-born artist is so fascinating. Such a beautiful and rich voice that takes you directed into the music:

“Leyla McCalla, erstwhile Carolina Chocolate Drop and occasional Our Native Daughter, is on a search: “I am trying to be free … I’m trying to find me,” she sings at the start of this album’s first song, “Open the Road.” Then later, near the end of Sun Without the Heat, she delivers herself a message: “Give yourself a break.” In between, she depicts a struggle to balance life as a single mom with her mission as an artist and activist. It’s not that explicit, of course. On multiple levels, the album is an imaginative weave: With her deft band, the New York-raised, New Orleans-based musician (on cello, banjo, and guitar) pairs music from her Haitian-American roots with threads of its Caribbean, Latin-American, and African family tree. She also echoes her past explorations of economic disparity, cultural identity, and colonialism’s pernicious persistence while adding frank, poetic looks at her own heartbreaks, doubts, determination, and hope for renewal. As such, it’s the most engaging, dynamic and, crucially, personal of her five solo albums. She’d recently hinted at this fusion with her gripping multi-media theater work Breaking the Thermometer, which drew both from the violent history of Radio Haiti’s defiance of the nation’s dictatorships and from conversations with her own Haitian grandmother. Heat is something different, though. Even when she sings “Can’t have the sun without the heat,” a line from an 1857 Frederick Douglass speech meaning that anything good comes with struggle and work, she’s covering both cultural history and her own life. But overall, as on the torchy “So I’ll Go” and the quasi-rhumba “Tower,” the latter with a stinging guitar solo from guitarist Nahum Zdybel, McCalla is grappling with matters of her own heart. Does she give herself a break? Well, kinda. The album closes with a prayer in “I Want to Believe.” Emphasis on the want. The struggles—personal and otherwise—will never be over. No sun without the heat. – GRADE: A”.

I am going to end with a review from MOJO. They gave a very positive and interesting review to the wonderful Sun Without the Heat. Ten years on from her debut solo album, Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes, I think that Layla McCalla has produced her finest work to date. An artist always building, growing and evolving. I really love what she is putting out into the world:

“LEYLA McCALLA’S previous album, the Obama-approved Breaking The Thermometer, was a song cycle about Radio Haiti-Inter and how the station’s journalists chronicled the suffering of the country’s marginalised people in the face of political instability, corruption and bloodshed. It’s testament to her inventiveness, her deftness, that such weighty material translated to so uplifting a listening experience. The Haitian-American cellist/singer/songwriter pulls off a similarly impressive feat on this follow-up, inspired by Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals, a text by academic Alexis Pauline Gumbs that explores the historic mistreatment of sea life as a metaphor for society’s abuse of oppressed people. Again, heavy stuff. But McCalla once more works her alchemical magic, her Caribbean-rooted folksong engaging with the overriding message of Gumbs’ work: that change is always possible. So there are songs here to soothe, to reassure. Her honeyed vocal is often in comfort mode, as on Give Yourself A Break, where she strings her words of compassion across simple ukulele strum and Pete Olynciw’s contemplative bass. On the keening, closing track I Want To Believe, her tentative optimism is cushioned by reverb-heavy piano chords and a melody retracing Desperado’s steps, the warmth of the familiar offering strength. But these aren’t simply lullabies to pacify. Scaled To Survive is a rumination on the bond between parent and child and the importance of joy, McCalla directly quoting Gumbs’ text when she sings, “Thank you for laughing me into this portal”, over upbeat guitar chimes, an undertow of cello and the chirping of birds. On lines like “What you learned drowning taught me how to breathe” and “How do you let yourself feel all the pain?”, she’s also keenly aware of her parents’ sacrifices as first-generation immigrants, pushing the song into a darker space.

McCalla and her musicians pursue this tension throughout. On Tree, a woman metamorphoses into a sapling for want of love, while another throws herself into the ocean, searching for escape. As if to mirror these turbulent journeys, the song’s shimmering acid-folk itself shifts into intense psychedelic freak-out, Nahum Zdybel’s volcanic fuzz guitar and Shawn Myers’ brittle snare as abrasive as some sublime Zamrock jam. Take Me Away’s yearning for transfiguration – its earnest plea of “Make me unafraid, make me brave” – is soundtracked by guitars that sound like thumb pianos, set to charged, Fela-worthy Afrobeat shuffle. These are songs of hope and transformation. But as on the title track, dedicated to former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Mc-Calla knows you can’t have that hope without fear, and she never ignores that the act of transformation can itself be traumatic. This edge, this acknowledgment of the stakes at play behind her messages of faith, pushes these songs past any risk of empty sentimentalism, and makes Sun Without The Heat truly uplifting”.

For anyone who does not know about Layla McCalla, then do yourself a favour and listen to her music. Her latest album is a wonderful and accomplished album that is very open and moving. A sensational and unforgettable listening experience. The stunning Sun Without the Heat is surely one of the best albums…