Leyla McCalla via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Leyla McCalla:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Leyla McCalla
- City: New Orleans
- Country: United States
My Life & Work
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Bio:
The Capitalist Blues is Leyla McCalla’s way of processing the current political environment, where many of the issues are financial, but they’re rarely simply financial. “It feels like everyone’s in a pressure cooker in this country,” she says.
The album is McCalla’s third, after Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes (2013) and A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey (2016). Those albums and her time as a member of the African-American string band The Carolina Chocolate Drops presented her vision in songs that revealed the realities that people lived, often expressed in metaphors. She explored Haitian Creole identity issues in songs with arrangements that focused on the song. She often sang and accompanied herself on cello, banjo, or guitar.
The New York-born McCalla has lived in New Orleans since 2010, and A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey broadened not only her examination of Creole identities but her sound as she brought in a number of musicians to add fiddle, clarinet, piano, electric guitar, and additional voices.
Her growing relationship to the city’s musical community led her to consider her relationship to New Orleans on The Capitalist Blues, and for the first time, it led her to record with a band. It wasn’t by design. Producer Jimmy Horn asked her sing on a session with his acclaimed New Orleans R&B band, King James and the Special Men, at a time when she had new songs but was unsure what forms they should take. While singing with the Special Men, she realized that working with Horn and his band in New Orleans might be the right way into the new material. The collaboration marks the first time someone other than McCalla has produced her work. The Capitalist Blues shows a more physical, danceable side to McCalla’s music. The title track is a swinging blues, and it’s easy to hear the classic New Orleans R&B in “Me and My Baby,”and the calypso in “Money is King.”
The album also puts McCalla’s voice in a number of new contexts as the size and composition of the band behind her varies from track to track. “There’s more arrangement,” she says, so her voice stands out in the way fans of her previous albums might expect on the spare “Pennha,” but she’s clearly part of a rowdy group on “Me and My Baby.”The pressures people deal are subtext on some songs, but they’re tangible and personal in others. “Heavy as Lead” addresses the threat caused by lead in the soil—a problem that became very real for McCalla when her daughter tested positive for elevated lead levels. The Capitalist Blues is superficially different from McCalla’s previous albums, but she hears the connections between them all.
She still sings a number of songs in Haitian Creole, which she thinks of a “language of resistance,” and she further explores the connection between New Orleans and Haiti. Her interest in social justice issues remains, and many of the themes are extensions of ones she examined on A Day for the Hunter, a Day for the Prey. The lineups are very different, but the songs come from the same place.
“To me, it’s all folk music,” McCalla says. The album is striking as McCalla employs a broader musical palate than on her previous albums, one that often involves a full band and percussion. One instrument noticeable in its absence is the cello, which has been McCalla’s signature instrument throughout her solo career and her time with the Carolina Chocolate Drops. “I’ve come to a place where I feel like making art is not tied to being a cellist,” she says.
Contact Information
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Management/Booking:
Management:
Aaron Johnson at Knitting Factory Management
aaronj@knittingfactorymgmt.com
(510) 610-6997
Booking (North America):
Mel Puljic – The Awesome Company
mel@awesomecompany.net
Booking (Europe):
Jean-Herve Michel at Nueva Onda
info@nuevaonda.fr
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Twitter: leylamccalla
- ▶ Instagram: leylacello
- ▶ Website: http://leylamccalla.com
- ▶ YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLU2ydZ3FX_UXICRPMDatDA
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCyeBZWWIMgnvNvJyCxC73qg
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/7fvhdxZ2ZaRpHgfOOGYtwZ
- ▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/4J4u8xcpz1WTAJRcgenpBa
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging from New Orleans to Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... through Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
