27 f
“I
t felt like music was every- where. I felt inspired and opened up by the experience of being there.” It was around this time that her idea for the
Langston Hughes project began to coalesce. She’d had the idea since she opened up the page of the book her father had given her and started to hear a melody as she read the words. She was 21 and living in Brooklyn at the time and she says “I was really just think- ing a lot about what I wanted to be in the music world. I wasn’t happy in a career play- ing classical music at weddings and I thought what would it be like if I made up my own music. I felt I had an ear for melody and I thought the one that had been inspired by the poetry wasn’t really bad.”
McCalla had taught herself guitar when she was about thirteen and would play along to Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead. She’d messed about writing songs before but started to write more in earnest for her duo during her last year at college. She says that when she writes she finds “it’s the music that usually comes first to me, I hear something, a melody or a rhythmic pattern that I’ll hear a melody over. I don’t notate stuff, I just record it and build on the songs. I thought it would be cool to do a project with Langston Hughes’ words. Though I wasn’t singing then.”
When she started her Langston Hughes project, which was eventually released as Vari-Coloured Songs in 2014 (Music Maker in the US, Dixie Frog in Europe) she got friends to sing the songs, some of which
she’d incorporate into Medicine Woman shows for Deborah to sing. But she says “I was so picky about how everyone should sing them that they said ‘Why don’t you just do it yourself then?’ I hated the sound I was making. I’d feel good when I was recording but I’d hear it back and think this is terri- ble!” Back then she says “I didn’t know how to control my voice, it was like a wild beast that needed to be tamed,” and so she took a couple of lessons to learn how. She’s far too self-critical. And on her latest album her voice is rich and warm and supple.
Making the album made her feel really connected to Haiti. Having started the pro- ject years before she knew it was going to be an album helped the creative process feel really free. Langston Hughes’ poetry is, she says, so amazingly powerful and rele- vant, and touching that her focus was just on trying to get the music to convey the message of the songs. It felt great she said, when the album was released, to get the songs out, some of which she’d been sitting on for five years.
Back in New York, McCalla realised that she’d become a hostage to paying her rent, so she moved New Orleans in 2010 and co- incidentally discovered the ties that bind her new home with the home of her par- ents and their ancestors. “Louisiana became a state directly due to the Haitian revolution. The French lost so badly they had to sell part of their land and Louisiana accounted for almost a third of the US at the time.”
Finding a flat within two weeks that was $300 less than what she was paying in
NY, she says “It felt like ‘I can do this! If you’ve hustled in NY and had to make your way you have that survival instinct. I got another teaching job working with the New Orleans strings project and was playing in the street. I started playing with different bands and that’s when I started getting into trad jazz and took up the tenor banjo. It has the same strings as the cello, so I under- stood the map of the instrument.” She started to understand the legacy of Kenny Barker and Don Vappie and all these incred- ible musicians in New Orleans, where her friends are all musicians and music is just a part of everything.
I
t was whilst she was playing on the street there that CCD’s manager came up to her and asked “Do you have a sister called Sabine McCalla who goes to Wilson College and lives in Ashville, North Carolina?” They’d met her at a Chocolate Drops gig because her fiddle teacher brought her to the show. And so started what McCalla described as her postgrad education.
She learned how to live on the road. It exposed her to interviews and the business of music and, most significantly, it showed her how music could raise social questions in a way that was fun and inspiring and fresh. She joined the CCDs in 2011 and stayed with them until the first half of 2014. It was, she says “intense”.
It was Rhiannon Giddens who put her in touch with Joe Burnett who produced her latest album which, like her first album, fea- tures guest appearances from various mem-
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