Leyla McCalla – Vari-Colored Songs A Tribute To Langston Hughes
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings – Re-Issue – Out Now (on Vinyl in January 2021)
Leyla McCalla could never have been artistically satisfied confined to the musical possibilities offered to a classical cellist. Not that she wouldn’t have been fantastic if that were her chosen path, quite the opposite as her ability would surely have shone bright, but to plough a more individualistic creative furrow was always going to enhance her talents far more. Over the past six years, in which time three solo albums have been released, she has speedily blossomed into a thoroughly engaging, unpredictable, inventive, soulful and multi-faceted artist. As entertaining as she is inspiring, McCalla enters the Covid-vaccine enhanced, bright new world order of 2021, as one of the must-see performers, not just in the folk world, but in all world music. And I do not make that statement lightly.
‘Vari-Colored Songs’ is a re-issue of her acclaimed 2013 debut album. It will be of interest to anyone who has discovered Leyla through her subsequent genre-busting releases, or through her pivotal roles in Carolina Chocolate Drops or more recently Our Native Daughters. They are firmly advised to go back and immerse themselves in this fully cohesive and wholly realised solo debut project; one that was originally put into place by a Kickstarter campaign that, having aimed to raise $5,000, would end up yielding $20,000.
Leyla’s instincts had been whispering in her mind for some time, that maybe the classical path she appeared to be headed on would eventually represent a wrong turn. She confesses that the idea of playing music “in environments that championed a Western perspective” did not sit well as a first-generation Haitian American. Post-graduation she would combine work and gigging with a love of exploration and improvisation to arrive at a firm vision of what she really wanted to do with music. The final piece of the puzzle was a book gifted to her by her father; ‘The Selected Poems Of Langston Hughes’. These words spoke to Leyla and in sensing how they would often lend themselves to music, the seed of a project was found. Still, it would take years and a further tome of collected Hughes works found at a flea market for these rather serendipitous discoveries to take shape.
It was the poem which lends this album its title that really pushed the forward button. It encourages the reader to pick up a guitar and imagine what the words might sound like in a melody. Beyond the gestation of this album though there were larger impacts on McCalla’s evolution, she began to hear melodies in other poems as well as spotting a modern-day resonance in Hughes humane words. Her subsequent forming of a collective called the Langston Hughes Project would certainly have created a buzzing environment in which Leyla McCalla refined a voice and style of her own. And because it was allowed to proceed naturally at its own pace, this debut album arrived with the sound not of an artist taking her first tentative steps, far more the sure-footed vessel with a confidence in her stride.
As I have discovered on all Leyla’s recordings, she grabs the listener on a higher level immediately because she is so musically adept. She has such a fine ear for melody and texture that her albums do not need hard work to hook you in and yet they also offer depth and maturity. Opening tune ‘Heart Of Gold’, which takes a thoughtful Hughes meditation on privilege and opposing societal statuses, is elemental in its acoustic simplicity. But McCalla doesn’t merely caress her cello in the traditional fashion, she is strumming it with vigour as Tom Pryor’s pedal steel and Joseph Dejarnette on bass make the song soar into the sky. The same thing happens on ‘Too Blue’, in which Hughes words are sung with a real Jazzy verve by Leyla as she swings along on her banjo and Luke Winslow King adds fine and breezy slide guitar; a sharp juxtaposition to a lyric that wonders where to turn when “nobody cares about you when you sink so low. What shall I do? What shall I say? Shall I take a gun and just put myself away?”
In ‘Song For A Dark Girl’ Leyla brings her credentials as a solid purveyor of the blues to the table. She is a fine vocalist in this tradition, with flashes of Bessie Smith to my ears. In a tune that mourns how “they hung my black young lover to a crossroads tree” it is hard not to think of Billie Holiday too. It is true when you listen to these songs that you are hard pushed to imagine these Langston Hughes lyrics belonging in any setting other than yearning blues in the jazz vocal lineage. But my listening pleasure in this album is not limited to McCalla’s bringing Hughes words to life. Her journey into the core of the poets work lead to considering her own early life travels to Haiti which in turn prompted a growth in her knowledge of Haitian history; McCalla reports how this “deepened my perspective on blackness, politics and social dynamics”.
All this learning and cultural joining of the dots resulted in an album overflowing with genuinely fresh blooms from old roots. Traditional Haitian folk songs are thrown into this simmering melting pot which only added to the variety and vitality found on ‘Vari-Coloured Songs’. Making these connections enabled McCalla to highlight how Hughes had aimed to “legitimize Black vernacular by celebrating its nuances and expressions, taking it from the fringes of society to the heart of academia and the literary expression of Black culture”. By moulding these ambitions into a work that also, through her own words, reflected her first person experiences as a Black American woman and daughter of Haitian immigrants, ensured this solo debut was a work belonging firmly in the modern musical landscape. Leyla McCalla has taken huge leaps forward from this mature solo launch pad but, with this timely re-issue, it is an album that remains ripe for wider discovery; its delights are many and varied indeed.
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