root salad Creole Choir Of Cuba
They’re from Cuba but their three generations of roots are from Haiti. Elisavet Sotiriadou uncovers the background.
T
he Creole Choir Of Cuba’s warm, soothing Haitian music may have been recorded in Wiltshire, but these soulful harmonies have kept their Creole flavour and Caribbean character despite the English touch. What is even more incredible is that these songs are freedom songs or even protest songs, but you would not realise this just by hearing them.
Santiman (‘sentiment’ in Cre- ole) is their second album record- ed in the Real World studios – the first was called Tande-La, which means listen up or listen to that. There is a lot of emotion in the velvety, classical sound of the album, and their voices have replaced the instruments in some parts of these traditional songs which have been passed down through generations of Haitian emigrants in Cuba.
Director and founder of the
Choir, Emilia Chavez, tells me that there are also songs which they’ve been inspired to create. They are not necessarily written in the traditional Haitian style – they allow the “force of the music to guide” them – but at the same time, the Haitian sound isn’t lost. There is a song about the 2010 earthquake in Haiti where the Choir went to offer humanitarian aid.
I caught up with Emilia, who not only directs the choir but also sings in it, when they were on tour in America. Tour man- ager Kelso Riddell helped me with the translation from Spanish. Emilia and the band are from Camagüey in Cuba. Though I’ve never visited this, the third largest city of Cuba, the one thing I do remember strongly from my time in Cuba is live music and dance being present on every corner, in hotels, in bars and restaurants and on the streets. There is no way to escape the music and rhythms in Cuba, for on the sur- face it is a nation full of happy people who sing a lot. Emilia agrees, “Cubans are natu- rally very lively and extrovert with a great sense of humour.”
In Cuba, each province has a choir. This one started eighteen years ago with members from the large provincial choir of Camagüey, which contralto singer Emilia has been directing for nearly 35 years. The people in the provincial choir who were of Haitian origin felt they should keep up their culture, the songs with all the histories and stories of their ancestors who had emigrated from Haiti to Cuba, Emilia says.
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So the group was formed from three generations of immigrants: the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Haitians. All Emilia’s four grandparents were Haitians and the ten members of the Creole Choir Of Cuba are all descendants of former freed slaves from Haiti.
“Lots of these songs we’ve heard since we were born. But when we started to travel to Haiti, we heard other songs and friends wrote us songs, they brought us recordings of songs which we were already singing but also songs we didn’t know. But more important was being brought children’s songs by the children of Haiti themselves when we were visiting,” Emilia says. The Choir went to Haiti as part of Cuba’s medical mission and mental health programme to work with children and give people the message that there was still life after the disastrous earth- quake. Through music they were trying to communicate with children who had been left traumatised after losing their parents. It was through this work that the children opened up and began teaching them songs they knew.
But the choir have also had some help to create their sound. “In the second album we invited an English pianist,” Emil- ia says, “and one of the trumpeters is from Burkina Faso.”
I
asked Emilia how she manages to create this sound. The voices are given centre stage with minimal instruments, yet there is a beautiful richness in the sounds and emotions evoked by their songs which are sung so passionately. Emilia says “It is not difficult because every singer knows what they are trying to say in the song, and they feel and experience the words each time they sing them.”
There are three songs that stay in my heart as I listen to the album, Fey Oh Di Nou, Panama Mwen Tonbe and Boullando. Emilia explains that “these are songs which each have different sentiments, feelings and rhythms, but they identify the nature of Haitian music.”
What the traditional freedom songs that the Choir sings have in common is that they are simply good songs, Emilia says. “Within the Haitian tradition there is a group of protest songs that started in Haiti under the government of Duvalier or Papa Doc. These are songs that interest us because of their melodic strength, their rhythms, and they’re very well done musi- cally, so that is why we include them in our repertoire,” Emilia says.
You can tell…
www.creolechoir.com
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Photo: Sven Creutzmann
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