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bers of the Chocolate Drops. “Most of the arrangements are simple,” she says, “with me overdubbing myself. I was having seri- ous breakdowns in the studio. All I wanted to do was to make this album – and I know now I’m a terrible musician. I learned that you have to follow your voice and that sometimes you have to be more playful and try different things with yourself.” Joe Bur- nett, she says, was brilliant. “He’d say let’s just do the work and not focus on that bad feeling you have right now!”
Giddens joins McCalla for a beautiful
duet, Maman, on A Day For The Hunter, A Day For The Prey. The album also features sparkling strings, in gorgeously sparse arrangements that allow all the parts to shine – and her Canadian husband Daniel Tremblay on five-string banjo, guitar and triangle. They met in New Orleans and mar- ried after falling in love in a wonderful whirlwind few weeks. And now they tour together in McCalla’s band taking their daughter Delilah along too.
Her songs, she says, are always inspired by her reading. A Day For The Hunter, A Day For The Prey is also the title of a book by the renowned ethnomusicogist Gage Averill.
“It’s about the intersection of music and power and politics in Haiti throughout the 20th Century.” Madison Smartt Bell’s books about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution are also an inspiration, as is the work of the musician/scholar Ned Sublette, particularly his writing on New Orleans and Louisiana that served also to inform her understanding of Haiti. “I didn’t realise before how much Haitian history fitted into Louisiana’s.”
we think we live by but we’re not always thinking in the best interests of each other and we’ve done this over and over again for hundreds of years. I like to talk about that. I don’t think my music will stop it all and save the world but I am interested in the conver- sations that come from that.”
H “When you have a political leader – I
don’t want to call him that – saying ‘Let’s build a wall,’ well, let’s start in Alaska, because if you go back to the history of whose is whose, none of it is ours. We’ve
er music, she says, “is a lot about setting the record straight about our history, and collective understanding about ourselves. We have high ideals
created this world on power and greed and some of us having more and living off the backs of those who have less.”
She believes that we’re better off talk- ing about our failures and prejudices and things that hold us back from being who we can be, and says “Since I started playing Haitian music and telling the stories around the songs, people said they loved it and dis- covered so much. We have so much to tell one another, but unless people feel an emo- tional connection, their ideas are not changed and that emotional connection genuinely happens with music.”
I wonder if the birth of her daughter has brought all this into sharp relief for her.
“Yes.” She smiles. “It really has. Delilah was born in August 2014. She’s amazing, cute and funny. But this realisation that I can’t protect her from everything is really intense, it’s scary. She plays the triangle and the ukulele,” she says proudly, “and she wants to play cello!”
There’s no doubt Delilah will know exactly what this is. There’s simply no way Leyla McCalla’s daughter could ever mistake a cello for a piccolo.
www.leylamccalla.com F
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