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Rhythm Nation: how music gives Haiti hope amid the chaos
The country has been hit by decades of crises and catastrophe, but its culture continues to thrive across the diaspora. Here, Haitian musicians celebrate its ’sounds of freedom’
In the 80s, Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose father was Haitian, took the art scene by storm with his outre graffiti, otherworldly painting and barbed political commentary, while today Haitian-born artists Myrlande Constant and Frantz Zephirin are producing exhilarating canvases. Between the 1950s and 80s, musicians Nemours Jean-Baptiste, Coupé Cloué and Boukman Eksperyans excelled in genres such as compas, manba and rasin, which all have entrancing dance rhythms derived from Africa and provocative lyrics in the Creole language born of contact between French settlers and enslaved people. The music, which also has echoes of American and Caribbean avant garde artists such as Ornette Coleman and Jacques Coursil, was spontaneously composed during a rehearsal in which horns, keys and percussion blended together in a suite that ebbs and flows through abstract soundscapes and taut grooves.
Or read this on The Guardian
