Plunged into a severe political crisis, the Pearl of the Antilles is in all our thoughts — and at the heart of the programming of the Montreal International Jazz Festival (FIJM), which this year shines the spotlight on the influence of Haitian music in the evolution of jazz by inviting a handful of musicians with Creole roots. Several of them will be gathered on stage for the concert The Haitian Revolution through the Jazz Traditionpresented on 1er July. Conversation on the rhythms of the island, the ingenuity of its diaspora and the place of spirituality in jazz with Jowee Omicil and Theo Abellard.
“I’ve been blowing the saxophone for 31 years,” says the composer and band leader Jowee Omicil, joined in his “laboratory” on 18e arrondissement of Paris, where he has been pursuing his career for a decade. “I’ve always had good feedback on the albums I’ve released, but never as much as for this one,” entitled SpiriTuaL HeaLinG: Bwa KaYimaN FreeDoM Continued and released at the beginning of the year, the most audacious, the freest, the most inspired, and above all the album closest to his Haitian roots in his career.
A long and exhilarating free jazz fresco which summons the spirit of the ancestors which we listen to through our instrument and those of our accompanists (bass, keyboards, percussionists experts in voodoo rhythms) who expressed themselves in a spirit of listening and of spontaneity. “We were in the studio in a creative residency that was supposed to last three days,” says Jowee, born in Montreal, on scholarship at the famous Berklee College of Music in Boston. “At the start of the session, I just wanted to listen to the overall sound of the orchestra; we did our ritual as usual, a prayer in a circle, and I said to the guys: “OK, let’s play a little, very free, and then we go back to the console to listen to what happens.” »
At the very end of the recording, Jowee Omicil can be heard saying: “ Take one. » That was the only take: “When we listened back, we said, ‘Wow, what is that?’ It’s exactly the album I had in mind and that Ornette Coleman was telling me about. […] I always wanted to play free like that, like Ornette did, but I always told myself that the public wouldn’t understand. But Ornette was right, and I think the reason this project worked is that it was already blessed before it saw the light of day. »
When Jowee Omicil talks about his music, the notion of spirituality is never far away. “My father is a pastor, I grew up in church. When he listened to my albums, he always said to me: “You haven’t made your inspired album yet.” For him, music is spiritual”, a concept which also inhabits the work, still young, of the Montreal composer and pianist Theo Abellard, who will launch his first album next fall, not without revealing parts of it on July 2, with his trio.
“In my music, I explore the themes of spirituality and inner peace,” he explains. “It is also for me a quest for identity, to better inscribe myself in the history of this musical tradition that we call jazz.”
The Creole DNA of jazz
With the Rara Soley ensemble and New York colleagues Melanie Charles (vocals) and Jonathan Michel (double bass), Theo Abellard will take part in the event The Haitian Revolution through the Jazz Traditionpresented on 1er July.
“It’s a very important concert for me, obviously because of my Haitian roots, but also because Creole music clearly had an influence on the development of jazz,” explains Theo. It is a little known fact, as is little known, that the music of Haiti influenced Cuban music, which, in turn, percolated into jazz. Everything is linked” since the origins of the genre, a subject explored by Montreal researcher Caroline Vézina in her work Creole Jazz. French Creole Music & The Birth of Jazz (University Press of Mississippi, 2022), winner last year of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) Award for Best Historical Research in Recorded Jazz Music.
Cultural crossroads and cradle of jazz, New Orleans at the end of the 19th centurye and the beginning of the 20th centurye fostered the encounter between classical and popular European music, military marches, religious chants and African polyrhythms carried within them by all these musicians originating (in particular) from Haiti — in short, Creole music is written into the genetic code of jazz.
Jowee Omicil, who highlights Haitian contributions to jazz on his latest album, will invite his friend and colleague Harold Faustin, a guitarist who is “deeply rooted in voodoo music,” to join him on stage on July 3. I also had the privilege of performing with Azor, a student of legendary drummer Ti Roro, who also taught Max Roach, “who would spend his summers in Haiti to learn music there. Few people know that,” adds Jowee. “I never studied roots music, but I spent a lot of time playing with masters of Haitian ritual rhythms,” who shine brightly on his latest album.
“Haiti’s musical contribution to jazz development is impossible to quantify,” Omicil adds. This backbeat which I call the cornerstone of jazz and for which I am ready to stake my empire by affirming that it originated in the African kingdom of Dahomey and that it traveled to Haiti, where the people [noir] freed himself first. And with what? With the drums. With music. »
Theo Abellard (who also claims to have “grown up in church”) is looking forward to presenting his compositions on the 1er July “in a context that will highlight Haitian music, this strong link between the Antilles and New Orleans. Melodically, my inspirations come from everywhere, from classical music, from R&B, the sources are multiple, but in terms of rhythm, you can recognize my roots. Just listen to them – you know right away where it comes from, it comes from the Island!”