Leyla McCalla: Breaking The Thermometer — an album of Haitian history and rhythms

There are many ways to break a thermometer, whether careless or deliberate, turning up the heat until the mercury cracks the glass or smashing it against the floor. Leyla McCalla is never explicit about how we are to interpret the title of her new album, but all these associations hover around it.

The songs grew out of a stage show McCalla developed which was titled, more explicitly, Breaking the Thermometer to Hide the Fever and which probed the history of Radio Haiti. During Haiti’s darkest days, the station’s Creole broadcasts challenged the Duvalier regimes, until its founders were sent into exile. The show and now the album intertwine McCalla’s settings of Haitian songs and her own new compositions; audio interviews with Radio Haiti’s co-founder, Michèle Montas; snippets of broadcasts; and McCalla’s reflections on her Haitian heritage, mediated through interviews with Montas and with her mother.

A few years ago, Mélissa Laveaux’s Radyo Siwèl also looked at the island’s history through folk music and — in her case — an imagined radio station. McCalla’s song selection overlaps slightly: opener “Nan Fon Bwa” by Frantz Casseus was on the earlier album, but here it is arranged for urgent, repetitive bowed cello and percussion, offset with McCalla’s mother reminiscing about a summer McCalla spent in Haiti with her grandmother, like a Caribbean version of the opening of Steve Reich’s Different Trains: “You came back saying you were Haitian.” (Laveaux duets with McCalla on a delicate reading of Manno Charlemagne’s song “Pouki”.)

From here we go back in time. The light melody of “Fort Dimanche” belies the horrors of the notorious prison. “Pot a tè pa goumen nan pot a fè,” sings McCalla: the clay pot does not fight the iron pot. The album probes the faultlines of US foreign policy and the ways in which the Reagan administration gave tacit approval to Jean-Claude Duvalier to crack down on press freedom. “Le bal est fini pour les indépendants,” she sings, over fuzzed guitar. “C’est un bal macabre.” (The ball is over for the independents . . . It’s a macabre ball.) The song breaks down into angry, ominous drumming.

Elsewhere, McCalla repurposes Caetano Veloso’s “You Don’t Know Me” to represent the immigrant experience in New York. The album finishes with a prayer by Boukman Dutty, one of the leaders of the rebellion that started in 1791, set as a slow choral alternative national anthem.

★★★★☆

‘Breaking The Thermometer’ is released by Anti