f24 The Haiti New Orleans Line
Leyla McCalla’s routes and roots have taken her and her cello on a fascinating journey, as told to Elizabeth Kinder. Photos: Judith Burrows
L
eyla McCalla’s rollicking second album has arrived in the world to stick two fingers up to Trump’s twisted vision for Amer- ica. Named for a proverb that
proclaims her Haitian roots, on A Day For The Hunter, A Day For The Prey (Harmonia Mundi) she sings in English, French and Creole as she romps through traditional and self-composed songs inspired by the intertwined Haitian and Louisiana cultures in which she thrives.
“Creole,” she tells me as we sit drinking tea in the bar of the St Georges Hotel, look- ing west over the rooftops of London, “feels to me like the language of resistance. It feels important to be singing songs of that culture.” We’re squeezing our meeting into her hectic gigging schedule. She’s just flown in from France where her first gig was to be at the Nice Jazz Festival. “I was texting my family saying ‘We’re going to be per- forming in Nice on Bastille Day! How appro- priate!’ And I arrived to all these texts say- ing ‘Please just let us know you’re OK.’”
The horror and insanity of that night did not make her want to run back home to New Orleans and bolt the door. Rather, it’s hardened her resolve to bash down the bar- ricades, to keep up conversations that raise questions regarding the truth of where we come from and ask us to look again at our assumptions on race, class, sexism et al in the light of it. It’s important, particularly in the US right now, where this kind of dia- logue is dying as Trump prevails. “I mean,” says this daughter of the ‘land of the free’ “what does it mean to be free, can we really be free if we’re afraid all the time?” And she meets Trump’s roar singing Creole music.
McCalla is passionate, but never irritat-
ingly worthy, and indefatigable. Her plane (into Luton) was delayed, her car was delayed, she’s spent hours on the road with her two-year-old daughter in tow, yet she arrives good-humoured, apologetic, fresh- faced and glowing. And we realise we’ve met before, when I interviewed Grammy award winners The Carolina Chocolate Drops, with whom she was then playing. “You were very shy and quiet!” I say. She laughs. “I was super timid! I’m not like that any more. It was such a learning experience. My grad degree was touring with the CCDs!”
One of the things she learned with them was that she could present music in its historical context and that this could be exciting, instantly engaging and fun. And her music is immediate and uplifting – her
passion connects as a sense of joy in being alive, which in the case of her reflective songs makes them even more poignant.
Given her refreshing clear thinking it’s ironic that we only have these songs thanks to confusion. Though to be fair, she was only small. “I was eight!” she tells me. “We had to choose our three favourite instru- ments and hopefully we’d get to play our first choice in fourth grade. I chose cello, flute and violin. The woodwind teacher was this cool young guy and all us kids wanted to be taught by him. First lesson I walked right up to the woodwind table to pick up my cello and there was this lady across the room going ‘Leyla McCalla! Cello! Over here!’ I was like Oh! That’s my teacher? That’s a cello? It was the first time I’d ever seen one,” discovering in that moment it wasn’t the piccolo she thought she’d signed up for.
She may have unwittingly signed up for a life lugging a large instrument around instead of pocketing her piccolo and travel- ling light, but woodwind’s loss and McCalla’s transportation issues are our gain. She shone at the cello and swiftly outgrew her first two teachers. So mum stepped in and organised lessons with the middle school teacher, Cyn- thia Longly, who was 22 and had just gradu- ated from college. McCalla says “It was exciting, she had hippie qualities and I wor- shipped her. She taught me in a very holistic way, taking me to performances and giving me recordings to listen to, like Yoyo Ma playing Bach cello suites. She was studying with Andrei Milianof, a professor at Juilliard who’s still touring. I got close to Cynthia and she said basically I think you can do this for your life and she passed me on to her teach- er when I was twelve.”
It was, she said, a huge boost to her self-esteem, which she struggled with like a lot of pre-teen and teenage girls. “It felt amazing having your teacher believe you are really capable of doing something.” And she got into the world of auditioning, chamber music and was first chair in her youth orchestra at the age of fourteen. By now she’d won a music scholarship to go to Kent Place School, a private girls’ school in Maplewood, New Jersey, where she grew up. She was just beginning to like the place – despite her super-privileged, mostly white classmates – and to enjoy how she was developing and growing as a musician when it all went belly-up and she was whisked off with her family to West Africa. Her parents had decided to relocate there to work with charitable organisations.
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