Caribbean Popular Dance-Hall Music I
The styles in this section focus on some of the most popular genres of Caribbean dance-hall music that people often associate with the area. My intention here is to attempt to set the music in its historical and cultural context which is the result of the interplay between the African continent and European colonial encounters.
Merengue: The National Dance of Haiti
The merengue, national dance of Haiti, goes back to colonial times in St. Domingue. It evolved from the music of the Kongo-Luongo-Angola people brought to the New World during the 15th - 17th centuries. In St. Domingue, the 2/4 time (short, short, long) music beat danced with lateral movements from side to side, was known by names such as "chica", "kalinda", "bamboula", or "carabinier" which became the "krabiyen", a folk dance found in the North and Central Plateau of present day Haiti. The national dance of Haiti until the 1960s, when the "konpa dirèk" took over, the merengue was subdivided into slow or "salon" (the "polite" living room version), fast dance-hall, and faster yet carnival merengue, suitable for reveling. A Haitian saying goes, "merengue ouvri bal, merengue fèmen bal" (merengue opens the dance, merengue closes the dance). Played on various instruments from solo piano to small combos, some of the leading exponents of merengue were ensembles like Jazz Guignard, and composers like Occide Jeanty and Ludovic Lamothe who wrote music in the Western European tradition. A medium for exposing gossip and political ribaldry, the merengue was the genre par excellence in a country where the oral tradition holds center stage. A study of the merengue should reveal an interesting segment of the colorful history of Haiti with its "revolutions" and power struggles.
One famous exponent of merengue in the 1930s was Auguste "Candio" de Pradines, whose composition "Fanm se Larèn Soley" (Women are Sun Queens), expressed a modern view of human relations, quite in advance of his time. Instead of the traditional gossip and politics, Candio pointed out the reprehensible behavior of many men in a patriarchal and macho society. Men who abuse women and children are not worthy to wear pants, he told us in a succulent merengue. Candio also wrote merengues critical of the American Occupation of 1915-1934, as he was one of the leading exponents of Indigenism, a movement that advocated a return to the African traditional roots that the Haitian literate elite had forsaken in favor of European ways.
The 1950s saw the rise of three seminal women composers of traditional Haitian music:
- Emerante de Pradines Morse: The daughter of Candio and the mother of Richard A. Morse from the band RAM, one of the leading "rasin" bands of the 1990s
- Martha Claude: Incorporated Haitian folklore and Voodou lyrics into her performances. Forced to take refuge in Cuba.
- Lumane Casimir: Performed with the "Jazz des Jeunes"(founded in 1942), the greatest ensemble in the first half of the 20th century in Haiti.
Emerante de Pradines Morse
Martha Claude
Lumane Casimir
All three women performed songs inspired by the Vodou repertoire. Emerante and Martha, both from the educated elite, were pioneers in their own right, as nobody from their class, and especially women, dared to promote Vodou in the days when the popular religion was openly persecuted by both the Catholic Church and the government. Lumane Casimir, an uneducated peasant, who became the voice of Haiti during the tourist boom of the 1949 Bicentennial Expo of Port-au-Prince, died in poverty and obscurity.
Composer: Lumane Casimir
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"Descendants"
The 1960s saw the rise of the "konpa dirèk", a style that evolved from the merengue. The mounting influence of the Cuban "guaracha" and Dominican "merengue" (music which later would be called salsa) prompted a reaction from Haitian musicians who felt the need to produce a music of their own. In the early 1960s, Haitian youth almost exclusively danced the Dominican merengue, the craze of Port-au-Prince. People did not always know the meaning of the lyrics, but the rhythms resonated with them.
Nemours Jean-Baptiste, one of the major dance-hall band leaders, slowed down the fast Dominican rhythm, and the "compas direct" (as it was spelled then) was born. Weber Sicot soon responded with his version of "cadence rempas." Of course, in spite of the statements to the contrary, there were little structural differences between merengue, compas direct, and cadence rempas, as they all stemmed from the same Kongo-Angola source. Yet "konpa dirèk" has flourished to the point where it now displaces all other genres and has become known internationally as the national music of Haiti.
Nemours Jean-Baptiste
An interesting phenomenon is that all the musics of the Caribbean with roots in the Kongo tradition have been naturally fused, at one time or another, to give birth to vibrant forms.
This is true in the case of samba, the national dance and music of Brazil. The origin of samba is multiple from a musical point of view, and its roots are to be found in the lundu, marcha, and maxixe. The lundu is an Angolan dance style brought in by the Bantu people during slavery, the marcha, a "one-two" Portuguese marching rhythm, and the maxixe, a fast dance-hall derived rhythmically from the tango and the habanera. Samba is more than a dance; it is a mood, a state of mind. It is at once solace, celebration, abandon, cultural reconnection, and a philosophy of life and the environment. To dance the samba, it has been said, is to be environmentally aware of one's biological and spiritual existence.
Rara bands hold ceremonies to ask the spirits to protect them and their instruments on the spiritually dangerous streets.
