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heir finely-tuned social con- sciences were forged in their childhood experiences in the tur- moil of Papa Doc Duvalier’s Haiti, the violence and political persecution which characterised his dicta- torship finally driving both their families to flee to America. Her father, whose own father – an architect originally from Jamaica – had died before he was born, was thirteen and her mother was five when they pitched up in New York with their respective families.


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Grandad on McCalla’s mum’s side lived in Brooklyn and ran a Haitian Socialist news- paper, Haïti Progrès. His marriage broke up and McCalla’s grandmother returned to Haiti to set up a school and McCalla aged ten spent a formative summer with her, accom- panying her as she went out to talk to the street kids. McCalla’s parents met when her father started work on Haïti Progrès and social activism became his life’s work. He went on to become the director of the Inter- national Coalition for Haitian Rights, remain- ing with that organisation for about 20 years until the family relocated to Ghana in 2001.


Her mother had gained a law degree whilst McCalla was in sixth grade, studying, working and raising two kids. Before mov- ing into non-profit organisations she worked for the US government in immigra- tion law, mainly with immigrants from Sier- ra Leone and Liberia. But it was her work with the World Church Services that prompted the move to Accra.


Given her background, it’s no surprise that McCalla too has a finely tuned social conscience but it wasn’t until she got to Africa that she woke up to this. It must have been a tough time as a young teenager to be uprooted, I suggest. McCalla nods. “I remem- ber my teachers were worried about me. I took my cello but the wood warped in the heat. I didn’t have the same people around me. I went to summer camp and played but basically it was over a year of not playing. I really felt that something was missing.”


Yet life in Accra was not alien to her. She found there was something very nostal- gic about being in Ghana that made her feel very connected to her Haitian roots, with many things reminding her of being there. This prompted her to read about Pan- Africanism which was a revelatory concept to her. Her father then gave her a book about Langston Hughes, the humanist Afro- American poet, writer and social activist for her sixteenth birthday, which later was to have a direct impact on her musical career.


“Coming back to the US from Ghana was the real culture shock. I thought my peers would be more open-minded than they actually were. I started to feel less American. I started to think about what the American thing was. There are so many people who don’t realise they’re privileged, who have so much and want so much, and are consuming more and more.”


“I felt that in Ghana too. We had a gar- dener and a cook and a driver, it’s not like we were living in a shack. We didn’t have that stuff in New Jersey. But I was around a lot of poverty for a while and coming back to the US it felt that we hide ourselves from seeing poverty. It’s not something we deal with in our daily lives. In Africa I gained a different perspective. I was the only Ameri-


can kid at my school in Ghana; I went to a British school and that was a shock. In America my high school was liberal arts, where it was about being open and finding a different way of communicating, whereas in the British system it was rigid, all about memorisation and facts.”


Back in the US she did not return to the


private girls school, but went instead to a public school and a different cello teacher and though she rejoined her youth orches- tra she started to rebel, stepping away from the classical world in frustration with what she now perceived to be its colonial- ism and elitism.


This did not dim her dream of going to Juilliard, but three different schools in four years and eighteen months away meant she simply wasn’t ready to audition for the big conservatoires. She was angry for a while, though she got into the prestigious Smith College on a music scholarship.


Although initially very impressed with Smith College, she was soon on the phone to her father. “I called my dad and said ‘I hate it here.’ He said you’ve only been there for two weeks!” But she wasn’t being chal- lenged musically and decided she had to go to New York. “I wanted to be a musician. I thought my options were just playing classi- cal music. I really loved chamber music, I thought maybe I’ll be in a string quartet and do cool progressive things in the classi- cal world and play Beethoven’s late string quartets. That didn’t happen. It’s still not happening!” And she now sees her trip to Ghana as “a divine intervention, one that forced me to have another path to just being a classical cellist and I had to catch up to that realisation. That was hard and sad, but now it makes total sense.”


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t NYU, McCalla felt she’d have the best of both worlds, as she’d be in a conservatoire environment and be able to take other classes. She was typi-


cally proactive in getting in touch with Marion Feldman, one of the world’s fore- most cellists and teachers who held a post at NYU. McCalla auditioned and got in. It meant losing the scholarship that she’d won at Smith, but she felt that exciting things were happening in New York in a way that they weren’t in Northampton, Massachusetts. And so she embarked on a mad and hectic three years where she sup- ported herself waitressing and playing wherever she could. It meant college dur- ing the day, working ’til the small hours and making the trip back to New Jersey where she lived with her mum in down- town Maplewood to start it all over again at seven the next day.


In her third year of college her mum left to go back to Ghana and McCalla decamped to Jersey City. She says “I got a job at a music venue, Zebulon, as a cocktail waitress. There was free jazz, Afrobeat, funk, rock and Israeli music. I met so many musicians. It opened my perception of what it means to be an artist and live that artist lifestyle.” And it meant that whilst pursuing her degree in classical performance she was becoming more and more interested in improvisation.


Amayo’s Fu-Arkist-Ra who mix Chinese Lion rhythms and Nigerian Afrobeat were Zebulon regulars and McCalla ended up play-


ing in the band for six years. “It was my birth- day, and my boss bought champagne. As we were drinking it he asked how old I was and I said nineteen and he said ‘you’re fired!’ Actually he did fire me eventually because I was subbing out my shifts to play in the bands who were appearing in the club.”


Her time in Ghana proved an asset for her improvisation in Amayo’s band as it had given her a good feel for Afro pop. And her music world widened with open mic nights in New Jersey, where a man named Richard asked her to sit in and introduced her to the blues of Memphis Minnie. They became good friends and she played blues and roots music in his band for two or three years. It was invaluable, she says now: “I learned a lot about listening and not playing.”


But key to her time at NYU was a man called Rufus Cappadocia. Just before she began her course her aunt, mum’s sister and an artist and a singer, took her to a party in Brooklyn. There she met a classically trained cellist playing with Haitian roots music band, the Voodoo Drums Of Haiti. “Rufus Cappadocia is Hungarian Italian, his cello had five strings, an extra string on the bass end, which gave it an incredible depth of sound I’d never heard before. He was slap- ping the strings, strumming, techniques I’d never seen before. I asked him to teach me. He said ‘Just come and play!’ I felt really connected to his experience of the classical world and his path being unorthodox and I was then able to see myself in that way.”


“What I learned at college was chal- lenging technically but not musically. The actual music part can be played perfectly but it doesn’t move people. I wanted to be on the path of moving people! I was eigh- teen when I met Rufus, just before I start- ed at NYU. It liberated me from the tyran- ny of perfection. I didn’t aspire to that any more. The university’s goal for me was no longer mine and as I grew comfortable learning with Marion I was able to be vocal about that. I’d say I’m concerned with expressing what’s inside, what feels right and what feels true rather than read- ing notes off the page and being impres- sive technically. It’s not my focus.” But McCalla was mature enough to under- stand that the technique she was learning and always improving would free her to fully realise her creativity.


She honed her musical skills teaching young black string players in classical and jazz, during her last year of university, believing she’s become a better musician through having to pass on her own educa- tion. By this time she was living in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn with her flatmate Deborah Smith with whom she’d formed roots/folk duo Medicine Woman, and in the spring of 2007, the year she graduated, the duo took a trip to New Orleans. “I didn’t like it. Although it was cool, it felt touristy. There was a lot of poverty, a lot of drinking and a big party culture that felt clichéd.”


Back in New York she launched into ses- sion playing, losing count of the albums she played on. And then after meeting celebrat- ed New Orleans street musicians Dorice & Tanya in New York, who asked her to play with them, McCalla decided to return to the Big Easy. Dorice and Tanya gave her a bicy- cle, a carrying case for her cello and a place to stay for a month. It was 2009. And this time she loved it.


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