Leyla McCalla's "Breaking the Thermometer" Broadens Her Musical Horizons at Jazz Fest

Leyla McCalla, by Noé Cugny

The music from her multi-disciplinary theater piece on Radio Haiti shows McCalla’s music and identity in transition.

“Ekzile” displays the subtle wisdom and craft on Leyla McCalla’s new album Breaking the Thermometer. The song features a woman journalist telling the story of fleeing Haiti to the United States during François Duvalier’s political takeover, and while she talks, McCalla’s music is heartbreakingly beautiful. It works as an elegy for Radio Haiti, the independent radio station that broadcast Haitian news is Kreyol, and for democracy in Haiti as well. The music continues well after the clip finishes to let the emotion sink in, and when the song ends with a full stop, it lands like a gut punch.

McCalla follows it with the patient folk song-like “Pouki,” which asks why things are the way they are as if she’s throwing pebbles in a lake and meditating on the ripples. She follows that with the assertion in English that “You Don’t Know Me,” which changes gears again. She makes the title assertion over a beach-y vibe with a guitar gently noodling in the background. By mid-song, her delivery is more intense and the guitar has followed its psychedelic path to become a more rambunctious presence and eventually a fuzz-toned freak out. 

That suite of songs is a microcosm of the album, McCalla’s most complete and assured yet. McCalla was born in New York to Haitian emigrants, and her Haitian roots have been one of the central features of her body of work. That made her a logical choice for Duke University, which commissioned her to write a multi-disciplinary theater piece based on its newly acquired archives of Radio Haiti, the first independent radio station to broadcast the news in Haitian Kreyol. That project became Breaking the Thermometer, which debuted in New Orleans at the Contemporary Arts Center last December.

As a narrative on record, Breaking the Thermometer is elusive because first, much of it is sung in Creole, and even if you have enough French to get in the song’s ballpark, there are still elements that slip by. I could pick up that “Fort Dimanche” is about a political prison used by Duvalier to torture his enemies, and that “Le Bal est Fini” addresses the end of independence in Haiti. That’s just a pawing understanding of the song though, and when McCalla explained on a video that “Dodinin” was a word for “rocking”—as in the way slave owners rocked on their porches while slaves worked—and that the upbeat, cheerful-sounding song addresses revolution, I was very conscious that a lot of the richness in her songs got by me. 

But the album isn’t the theatrical performance; it’s the music from it, without the spoken word and other material that stitch the songs together onstage. Once you acclimate to that, Breaking the Thermometer is lovely and impressive. McCalla broadened her musical palate for the occasion, working with musical forms that allow her to blur the distinctions between her own songs and folk songs, and between songs that sound rooted in a culture’s history and ones that sound unmistakably contemporary. 

McCalla says that working on the album made her think about her own identity and relationship to Haiti. The first minutes of Breaking the Thermometer signal that when her cello and percussion dance behind a phone conversation between McCalla and her mother as she tries to check her hazy memories of a visit to Haiti. 

“When you went that summer in Haiti, when you came back, you came back saying you were Haitian,” he mother says. “Before that, I think you saw yourself—maybe you didn’t see yourself as any nationality. But certainly when you came back from that trip, you started identifying more as Haitian.” 

Time has added nuance to her early relationship with Haiti, and I hear a similarly evolving relationship to her music on Breaking the Thermometer. McCalla’s Vari-Colored Songs and A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey relied on her cello and banjo for most of the instrumentation, so much so that the instrumentation felt like an identity, with all the associations of independence, art, and aesthetic purity that her musical choices brought with them. 

The Capitalist Blues from 2019 marked a change as she deliberately let go of control and recorded with a band, King James and the Special Men. That album’s big picture was McCalla becoming part of a community—a musical one on the record, but a part of her Bywater community in New Orleans. Many of the songs were inspired by the challenges people around her faced, though the music still clearly came from her.

Breaking the Thermometer sounds like McCalla embracing the possibilities opened up by The Capitalist Blues. She chooses the instrumentation for each song, at times giving us the spare, string-driven instrumentation that showcases her voice and melodies so effectively, but adding instruments to suit the moods and goals of the tracks. Drums and percussion instruments make it easier to hear the way she uses dance rhythms to add shadings of meaning to the songs. 

“I spent a lot of time recalling my experiences visiting Haiti as a child, thinking deeply about the moments in my life when I felt very Haitian and the moments when I didn’t,” McCalla says in a press release. “In the end, the music and the stories here all brought me to a more nuanced understanding of both the country and myself.” I’d argue she has also become more nuanced as an artist Breaking the Thermometer.

Leyla McCalla plays Jazz Fest on Friday at 1:40 p.m. on the Sheraton New Orleans Fais-Do-Do Stage. Breaking the Thermometer is due out May 6.