35 f
Moonlight at WOMAD
jamin, because as Bloque points out, “It’s a lovely name. So strong.” Tisseyre still pro- vided the percussion, and Amourette the guitar, but Christophe Rohrbacher com- pleted the line-up on flute. The aim was to go deeper into Creole songs, and include texts from Haitian poets as well as lyrics that Moonlight had written.
An EP, Memwan Defalke, followed in 2013. That same year the celebrated New York-based jazz saxophonist Jacques Schwarz-Bart (of Guadeloupean descent) enrolled her to his and Afro-Cuban pianist Omar Sosa’s ongoing project Cre- ole Jazz Spirit.
W
hilst Benjamin still con- tinues with this project, since 2015 she’s found a way to return to her own work. Wanting to break
with the picture postcard cliché of Haiti that she felt informed her earlier output, and which tended to suggest her for Haitian or Creole-themed events, she focused on creating music that would carry her to any festival, club or venue.
Siltane does just that, though it took a while to coalesce. Working from 2015 with Claude Saturne (“If you’re looking for tra- ditional Haitian Voodoo percussionists in France, he’s the only one”) whom she met in Creole Jazz Spirit, and with Haitian bass player Marck-Richard Mirand (whom she’d met via the Haitian diaspora in France), the three tried various line-ups until in 2017 they decided a drummer was required.
Bertrand Noel duly joined, adding his
Western rock energy to the proceedings, and introduced guitarist Matthais Pascaud in January this year. Pascaud and Benjamin
clicked creatively. She will write the melody, putting her own lyrics or Haitian texts to music, and sing this to Pascaud. The songs pouring out of them gelled with the band as they worked them out in rehearsal. Bloque says what they were doing “sounded so great, we decided to quickly record the tracks, though they’d never been played live before.” This was clearly a good idea.
The punk energy on the opening track
Memwa’n (memory), which deals with Benjamin’s sense that Haiti is “a country without memory” as it “repeats the errors in its history”, establishes from the get-go that this band mean business. Throughout the album themes of identity, roots and geography are explored, including the personal impact of issues relating to mem- ory and oblivion – “I come from an Africa I do not know” – themes that feature in Caribbean and Latin American literature. In the jaunty Port-au-Prince (you can hear it on this issue’s fRoots 70 compilation), Benjamin takes us on a tour of the capital, whilst deploring the degradation she finds there. And though this subject demands pause for thought it, like all the tracks, makes you want to dance.
As well as self-composed lyrics, tracks feature the poems or writings of Anthony Phelps and Georges Castera, whose Des Murs [walls] “explores the evolution of life in Haiti, its hardening, gradual closure, uncontrolled urbanisation and the prolif- eration of division.” Also featured are poems by Richard Narcisse and Frankéti- enne, the first author to publish in Haitian Creole in his writing about life under the Duvalier regime.
The Voodoo that underpins her music, as it seems to underpin life in Haiti, is not hidden. Papa Legba, composed by Pascaud and Benjamin with its great guitar riffs, driving bass, rousing drums and soaring vocals, draws on Voodoo tradition to pay homage to the “major spirit of the Voodoo pantheon,” who like St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, guards the passage to the spirit world. And Simbi, featuring sim- ply percussion and vocals, pays tribute to the spirit of waters.
Very basically, in Voodoo belief there is a distant and overarching God and below this entity a pantheon of spirits with distinct characteristics and tastes and roles that relate to daily human life and the natural world. Specific appeal is made to the relevant spirit depending on the matter of concern, rather like praying to a saint, angel or virgin. Unlike most Catholic (but not evangelical) services, ceremonies use music and dance for the priests to enter an ‘empty’ trance-like state, which allows the spirit to enter and express through them.
In a country where the power of nature is so overwhelmingly obvious, it’s perhaps unsurprising that a religious belief that suggests a connection with it (and a course of action in the face of it) gives rise to the saying, “Haiti is 80% Catholic, 20% Protestant and 100% Voodoo.”
Benjamin says that it was whilst living and working in France, and “doing Voodoo things without really knowing about the connection between the Voodoo world and the people” that she realised she should become initiated as a priestess.
Great. Here we are.
Photo: Cathia Randrianarivo
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