Unsung Haiti: the Caribbean’s underrated musicians

21.07.2023 - 08:00 / roughguides.com

Writer and musician Thomas Rees travels to one of the Caribbean’s most underrated destinations to meet the vodou singers, self-titled Haitian punks and innovative young producers shaping Haiti’s unsung music scene.Listen to Thomas talk about his experiences on our podcast.

It’s the frantic rhythms of the tambou that catch my ear, ceremonial drums shattering the evening silence. Then chant-like vocals and blaring trumpets that draw me from the seafront, through a yard scattered with half-formed carnival masks and mounds of shredded paper, to the upstairs room of a rambling house.

There, in the half-light, a group of musicians are beginning to play. Facing them, a troupe of dancers lunge and leap in time with the music, hurling their shadows against the walls and throwing their heads back, letting out shrieks and wolf cries. As the intensity builds, one dancer breaks off from the group in a whirling vortex of limbs and flings his sweat-slicked torso at the floorboards, writhing like a man possessed.

I’ve been in Jacmel, a town on Haiti’s southern coast, for all of an hour and I’ve already found what I’m looking for. If this were anywhere else I’d call it luck, but in Haiti there’s music wherever you go.

This beleaguered Caribbean nation is home to one of the world’s richest and most distinctive music scenes, and yet it’s seldom talked about outside of the country and the Haitian diasporas of cities such as New York, Miami and Montreal.

Haiti’s woes, above all the devastating earthquake of 2010, have cast a long shadow over its culture, and visitors to the country are still few and far between. But when the world wakes up, Haiti will be ready.

Here, three of the country’s leading musicians shed light on a scene characterised by deep roots, wondrous variety and restless ambition.

Erol Josué by Thomas Rees

Erol Josué is a difficult man to pin down. After a string of messages and abortive phone calls (“Oui Thomas, but call me back in an hour, I’m preparing myself to meet the president”), I finally manage to catch him, at the Bureau National d'Ethnologie in downtown Port-au-Prince. As a houngan (vodou priest), singer, dancer and director of the museum, Josué is a leading expert on vodou and its fiercest champion.

“Vodou is the most important culture in Haiti,” he tells me, as he recounts the origins of the religion, a fusion of West African beliefs brought to Haiti by the slaves, with the Catholicism of their 18th-century colonial masters. It’s been under threat for centuries, demonised by missionaries and distorted by Hollywood, something Josué describes as an act of “identity terrorism”.

Those songs are like an oral Bible. They tell the whole story of Haiti – the story of the native Taino Amerindians, of European