Boukman Eksperyans
Buying any of the many “world music” samplers on the market right now is like collecting messages in bottles without reading them. Whether they’re plucked from Tangier or Tibet or anywhere else in the world where people don’t speak English, the mysterious and exotic tunes that score our cosmopolitan cocktail parties often come out of cultures where the song is so integral to the singer’s daily existence that it can’t simply be clipped back into its plastic box when the party’s over. Ironically, that’s exactly what many casual world-music fans are after–not unlike some fans of hip-hop. Directness and urgency are sorely lacking in white American pop, where revolution is largely a fashion term. This is why people who don’t know their Tutsis from a hole in the ground fret when Western influences turn up on recordings by African musicians. But in a world where Asian experimental rock, South American metal, and Indian electronica can blow away their Anglo counterparts, it’s also some serious postcolonialist horsepucky.
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The best example of what I’d call real world music–music that draws on traditions from around the world–that I’ve heard recently is Revolution, the third album from the Haitian band Boukman Eksperyans. The 11-piece outfit’s sprawling, unpruned amalgamation of half a dozen identifiable genres from almost as many continents sounds fresh but not naive, simultaneously pissed off and celebratory. The opener, “Sevelan/Sukiyaki (No More Excuses for the War),” incorporates deep subsonic beats, call-and-response harmonies, and the lilting melodies of both the Haitian traditional “Sevelan” and Kyu Sakamoto’s 1963 number one hit “Sukiyaki.” The subtitle is sung in both English and Creole, to make sure no one misses the point, and you can actually hear the musicians cackling at their own audacity at the end. From there the album steamrolls through hip-hop, the upbeat carnival music called rara, Afro-pop, stadium rock, Marvin Gaye-style R & B protest balladry, and even the sort of what-hath-Mickey-Hart-wrought hippie groove that’s a staple of stoned soul picnics like New York’s summer concerts in Central Park–where, a friend in that city tells me, Boukman Eksperyans always gets a great turnout.
As often as the album rose to the top of my play pile this summer, I didn’t completely understand Boukman Eksperyans until I saw the band live at the Wild Hare in late September. There the pop playfulness moved to the edges, where it lingered like a verge-of-cracking-up smile on the face of someone delivering a vitally important speech. In the crowded club, the front row was dominated by flag-waving Haitian expatriates, some bearing the accoutrements of voodoo. Nothing was couched and everyone was moving. The drumming of Hans “Bwa Gris” Dominique, Henry B.D. Pierre Joseph, Alexis Raymond, and Gary Seney came to the forefront, drawing out songs like Revolution’s mesmerizing “Mesaj a Ginen” (a tribute to “the characters that have marked the history of the great religions: Moses, Krishna, Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mohammed and Boukman”) into marathon deep-dance explorations. Vocalist and bandleader Theodore “Lolo” Beaubrun Jr. cooed and exhorted, his voice cracking like a gospel preacher’s, while his partner Mimerose “Manze” Beaubrun, skirts swirling in perfect priestess rhythm, wailed and chided in counterpoint. Voodoo ceremonies often last for days, and I got the feeling that if it weren’t for Chicago liquor licensing laws, this ceremony might have too.
