Excerpt From 2009 New Yorker Magazine Article:"Haitian Music: What Does Revolution Sound Like"

Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post provides an excerpt from a 2009 New Yorker magazine article entitled "Roundtable: Haitian Music, Part 2: “What Does Revolution Sound Like?”.

The content of this post is presented for historical, folkloric, cultural and educational purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.

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EXCERPT: HAITIAN MUSIC, PART 2: "WHAT DOES REVOLUTION SOUND LIKE"
From https://www.newyorker.com/culture/sasha-frere-jones/roundtable-haitian-
music-part-2-what-does-revolution-sound-like
Roundtable: Haitian Music, Part 2: “What Does Revolution Sound Like?”
By Sasha Frere-Jones July 9, 2009
"Three months ago, I posted a roundtable discussion of Haitian music among several remarkable scholars and writers. Happily, they have returned to discuss revolution, “rara,” and other intersections of Haitian politics, daily life, and music. Take it away. (If any participant is unfamiliar to you, refer to the original post.)

Laurent Dubois:

I often think of Haitian music as a kind of remarkable archive, one that keeps traces of the process of deportation, slavery, and revolution that created the nation. The slave trade to the colony of Saint-Domingue in the late eighteenth century brought forty thousand people a year from different parts of Africa, and these different groups met up on plantations and in towns, exchanging ideas, confronting their new situation, and creating new music, religion, and language. And they did so in the midst of a thriving cultural life in the towns of Saint-Domingue (and later—after the revolution—in Haiti). All the significant port towns had theatres with several performances every week, and in the largest, Le Cap, a theatre performed the works of Moliÿre and Voltaire, and several plays written locally in the Creole language, which brought together African and French grammar and vocabulary. Some of the revolutionaries who won independence for Haiti in 1804 were big fans of this eighteenth-century music and theatre—the music for Emperor Dessalines’s coronation was drawn from Rousseau’s blockbuster opera, “Le Devin du Village”—and they reopened the theatres after the revolution, performing the old plays with all-black casts. This was a swirling and complicated cultural world, and it produced a remarkable musical tradition.

But part of what also comes through in much Haitian music is a kind of response to the question “What does revolution sound like?”

Elizabeth McAlister:

Laurent, what a great question; it lets us imagine the political soundscape of public spaces. We may have a clue about the soundtrack for some moments of the Haitian revolution: the French army marched to battle with bands—corps de musiques—featuring snare drums and trumpets, which would follow the commands of the drum major to communicate through the chaos of the battlefield. So this is the music of warfare. Even more interesting, though, as you say, is the music of revolution: maroon armies were also said to move through space while surrounding themselves with big musical sound. A maroon leader in the Port-au-Prince region named Halou, headed an army of two thousand maroons, whose leader “marched preceded by the music of drums, lambis [conch shells], trumpets and sorcerers…”

That seems very possibly a historical source for the parading festival called “rara” (which happens to be the subject of my first book). Rara still lends itself to the feeling of rebellion. During rara season, which is during Lent, musicians and followers sort themselves into what they consider small “battalions” out on musical maneuvers. Nowadays they move about neighborhoods and villages, “taking territories” by dominating musically, competing in aesthetic battles to see which bands can attract the most fans. It feels exhilarating to go out with them and dance for miles through public space in the relative cool of the Haitian night, dancing behind waves of drummers, horn players, percussionists, and singers, with children and market women trailing behind, selling sweets from baskets on their heads. They usually sing religious songs to the spirits in the morning, and stop to pay their respects to their people in the cemeteries. Then, by late afternoon, they’ll “call out” local corruption, singing what little they can about politics in cryptic, poetic songs, often recycled for generations to fit the present crisis (and unfortunately there’s usually a crisis).

Hearing a rara band as it approaches for miles through the mountains is quite thrilling—it must have been electrifying to hear the rebel-army bands during the Haitian revolution. Rara creates a sonic signifier of Haitianness like no other, because of the distinctive bamboo horns that are played by hocketing (one player on one note, with everyone playing on rhythm to get a melody going). You can get a feel for parading rara music on this Web site. The track called “Instrumental Isolations” gives the feeling of a rara band passing by, and the video “Musicians in an Artibonite Rara Walking” presents something similar.

Rara parades are catching on in the Haitian diaspora, too; they’ve been used in celebrations as well as protests in Miami, New York, and Boston. Recently, a rara band from Brooklyn called DjaRara played on the Mall after Obama’s inauguration.

Rara is so unbelievably rich that I could go on forever, so I’d better sign off.

[...]

Ned Sublette:

In trying to understand the music of Haiti, I find myself taking a transnational approach, because, as I keep arguing, the Haitian revolution was a generative explosion for the popular music of the hemisphere. It sent populations up and down the Atlantic coast and the Antilles—and ultimately to New Orleans, where many families from Saint-Domingue were reunited. There are places today where you can connect the dots by listening. Let me, then, make some connections.

To Elizabeth’s evocation of the trumpet and snare drum of the colonial military bands (which ultimately became the basis of the jazz instrumentation in New Orleans), I would add the vocal legacy of the military drill, which evolved into the gruff vocal style of dancehall reggae. The adoption of this vocal style throughout the Antilles echoes the universality of the quadrille in the same territories two centuries ago, when a commandeur barked out the dance steps.

The sound of revolution could easily have the same rhythm it had two centuries ago; it could be heard as recently as January in the street music from the underreported general strike that began in Guadeloupe and spread to Martinique. The rhythm that the L.K.P. (Liyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon, or Collective Against Exploitation) demonstrators are parading to is what was known in different times and places as the habanera, tango, and bamboula. In musical terms, dotted quarter, eighth, quarter, quarter: BOOMP, da DOM DOM. It’s a versatile but very specific rhythm, diffused across a wide geographic area. The scholar Robert Farris Thompson identifies it as the Kongo mbila a makinu, “the call to the dance,” and it was known in Arabic music. It’s the Antillean beat, bouncing around for three hundred years or more. It was the right-hand rhythm of Dominguan-descended Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “Bamboula” in 1848; it’s the invariable underlying rhythm of reggaetón; and it’s the rhythm underpinning the Guadeloupean demonstrators. Another version of the same L.K.P. anthem, “Gwadloup sé tan nou” (“Guadeloupe is ours”) demonstrates a politicized use of the dancehall/reggaetón style, by now firmly entrenched as the timbre and rhythm of a pan-Antillean sensibility.

There’s also a lexical component to the sound of revolution. There have to be ways to transmit secrets in order to accomplish a revolution, no? The chronicler M.L.E. Moreau de St. Méry gives in a footnote (!) the untranslated text of an anthem from Saint-Domingue—a text corroborated elsewhere, and, more remarkably, which Moreau was able to transcribe without knowing the language (not French, and, very interestingly, not Creole either, but Kikongo), possibly from having heard it repeated many times:

Eh! eh! Bomba, hen! hen! Canga bafio té Canga moune dé lé Canga do ki la Canga li

The anthem translates roughly as:

Eh! eh! Secret, hen! hen! Tie up the abusers Tie up the whites Tie (them) up (with) the action spirit Tie them up

When I think of revolution and music, my first thought is this text.

They had a secret, all right. They were singing out loud what they were going to do. Hey, hey, secret! It was no secret if you understood the song: Bomba! (“Bomba” is a word with a complex of meanings; the art historian and linguist Bárbaro Martínez Ruiz tells me it means “secret.”) Had Moreau de St. Méry known the meaning of the lyrics he transcribed, he could perhaps have seen better the revolution that was coming in 1791.

It’s not a coincidence that bomba is the name of the folkloric Afro-Puerto Rican musical form. I was unaware until recently that this song, which we find in Moreau de St. Méry’s eighteenth-century book, continues to be sung. It has been collected in present-day Puerto Rico by the musicologist Alex Lasalle, leader of the New York-based bomba group Alma Moyó. It’s a bámbula (which in New Orleans was known as bamboula). I would not be surprised to find it somewhere in Cuba. One thing’s for sure: this song was almost certainly sung at Congo Square in New Orleans in the eighteen-teens. This in turn cracks open a mystery: what one component—and not an unimportant one—of Congo Square sounded like. The fabled bamboula is still alive, in the Dominguan diaspora.

Sometimes, as in Haiti, revolution entails dancing. Makandal was recognized and apprehended at a dance. In various parts of the Antilles there are choreographic societies that go to great lengths to perform a memory of the moment of truth of more than two hundred years ago: the last days of plantation slavery in the French Caribbean.

[...]

The unintelligibility of much of hip-hop and reggaetón to outsiders, as well as its relentless code-switching, is another way of getting at that bomba, in the sense of a sung-out secret. One of the remarkable things about the dancehall/reggaetón sound becoming a pan-Antillean and Caribbean style is that through timbre and rhythm it crosses the language divide that keeps adjacent territories from talking to each other now that their African languages have largely, though by no means entirely, vanished.

[...]

Ned Sublette:

“When I was a kid, it struck me that the rara was always demanding respect, both with its loudness and active recruitment as it went along.”

Edwidge, you could be describing a second line in New Orleans, which I am convinced owes much to the rara. Last year around Easter I had the remarkable experience of going on a gagá (the Dominican equivalent of rara) out in the country in the Dominican Republic on Jueves Santo (Holy Thursday) and then going on a second line in New Orleans the following Sunday. Despite all the differences of specifics and style, it felt so similar.

For a different stab at Laurent’s question that involves a uniquely Haitian style of music, I think immediately of the first two albums by Boukman Eksperyans—who Madison brought up in our first discussion—which come out of a tradition of direct political engagement in music (mizik angaje): “Vodou Adjaye” (released in the bicentennial year of the religious leader Boukman’s uprising at Bwa Kayiman, generally considered the start of the Haitian revolution) and “Kalfou Danjere” (Dangerous Crossroads, released after General Raoul Cedras’s September 30, 1991 coup against Aristide; the title song was the subversive hit of Haitian carnival in 1992).

These albums came out on Chris Blackwell’s Mango label in the heyday of “world music” and received international attention; they’re classics, as I’m sure everyone on this panel can attest. Listening to them is like jamming your finger into a wall socket. Drawing on the energy of rara, this style of music called mizik rasin (roots) was built on culturally oriented, politically charged lyrics, choral chants, trance-inducing vodou drumming over a drum-machine pulse, and psychedelic lead guitar. (Those who want to explore further should pick up Gage Averill’s essential “A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey: Popular Music and Power in Haiti.”) There’s still nothing like the music generated by the rasin bands in that early-nineties moment of dangerous crossroads in Haiti—Boukan Ginen, RAM, Zobop, Kanpech, to name some that I recall from that time.

If I want to forgo the pop-music instrumentation and just go into the drum, which is where I most like to be, I go to Azor. Mizik rasin continues today, of course, and now has to confront a vision of Haiti’s future of sweatshop labor and importation of food.

Laurent Dubois:

I’m glad Ned brought us to Guadeloupe, and to the ongoing link between song and revolution, since it’s on that island that I’ve most often had the pleasure of participating in the pan-Caribbean tradition of street music we’ve been talking about. In Guadeloupe the two most famous groups, representing the two sides of the island, are Akiyo and Voukoum, each of them linked in important ways to the politics of protest and cultural revival. Their processions are led by a line of marchers striking long whips against the streets, which sends out a sharp, stunning crack (as you can see Voukoum doing here). Like the whips that are part of many Vodou ceremonies in Haiti, they are both a potent reminder of slavery and also a curious appropriation of slavery’s ultimate symbol for a radically different purpose, that of calling down the lwa or of opening the way for the music.

Their costumes, which parallel those found in New Orleans, Haiti, and Trinidad, tell the story of slavery: participants are sometimes dressed as “Congos” just arrived from Africa, covered in dark black grease, or else dressed as maroons, runaway slaves, as Akiyo is in a January 2009 procession. Akiyo’s anthem retells the history of abolition, declaring that it was not truly the French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher who freed the slaves, but rather the maroons who fought for liberty for generations. (One of the sponsors of the group over the past years has been the now-retired soccer star Lilian Thuram, long a pillar of the French national football team, who was born and grew up in Anse-Bertrand, Guadeloupe.) They evoke these histories in order to call for new kinds of marronage—running away from the plantations—in the present. What is powerful about these groups is that they really highlight the complicated politics of culture, and culture of politics, in the French Antilles.

The nationalist movements that developed there starting in the nineteen-sixties never rallied large majorities in favor of independence from France. But if political nationalism never really took hold, a kind of cultural nationalism that came out of the independence movements most definitely did, changing the way many Martinicans and Guadeloupeans think of themselves, and propelling the creation of groups like Akiyo and Voukoum. This movement, in turn, surrounded and in some ways sustained union activism and other political protest on the island, helping to lay the foundation for the strike that took place in Guadeloupe earlier this year.

As was the case two hundred years ago in Haiti, music and revolution are tightly intertwined, which makes sense, since one of the main tasks of Caribbean music has always been imagining the unimaginable.

I was in Haiti and then in Guadeloupe in late May and saw much of what we have been discussing in motion. In Haiti, on May 18th, Flag Day, there were many people out doing rara, bringing that tradition further into the national celebration. I saw one group led by a man with a large Bob Marley flag. And in Guadeloupe I was able to attend several events organized by the L.K.P., the coalition of groups that organized the strikes earlier this year. Raymond Gama, a historian who is a spokesman for the L.K.P., explained to me that though it was unclear what the next steps of the movement should be, or even what the specific goals should be for Guadeloupe, they felt that their victory was in mobilizing people, in showing them what might be possible in the future if they continue. We were at a nighttime dance driven by gwo-ka drumming, and with an illuminated grin he announced: “Nous sommes déjà demain!”—“We are already tomorrow!”

[...]

Garnette Cadogan:

What does revolution sound like? This begs for a long answer, but consider this shortcut: Bob Marley and, with apologies to Carl Wilson, not Celine Dion. (Some people may smack the wag in me and suggest, with good reason, that the sound of revolution is Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, the Beatles—to name a few. True enough, but Laurent, if I haven’t misunderstood you, you are not so much asking about revolution—dramatic, wide-reaching change—as you are reaching back to Revolution—political revolt that ushers in a new social order.) What, then, does that signal moment in the past—the Haitian revolution—sound like in the funky potpourri of rhythms that is contemporary Haitian music?

Thankfully, Haitian musicians possess a canny pop sensibility: they see no trade-off between being political heralds and pleasing a crowd. They tie their messages of resistance to catchy riffs and vibrant rhythms, producing ambidextrous music that presses the consciousness while shaking the hips and feet. Their songs may be infused with the memory of the revolution, they may make renewed challenges to power, they may weigh in on the heavy matters of the moment—but Haitian musicians never forget that they are entertainers. (This, in part, explains why some rara songs and parades are so ribald.) The music is infectious not merely because of catchy rhythms but also because satire (“pwen,” anyone?) does the heavy lifting, saving musicians—more often than not—from the snare of preachiness. (This is not only good musical sense—it’s common sense: explicit criticism of corrupt powers in Haiti has often invited a beating or worse.) With word, movement, and—uh-huh—sound all in coördinated service, the sound of revolution turns out to be as playful as it is weighty.

Boukman Eksperyans, whose very name advertises their aesthetic—Boukman was a Vodou priest and slave who helped incite the 1791 rebellion that started the Haitian revolution; eskperyans (“experience”) is a nod to Jimi Hendrix —is an excellent example of pop wed to protest.
On Vodou Adjeye, one of the albums Ned praises, traditional Haitian music (Vodou drums) and modern rock (guitar riffs) interweave beneath protest. (On “Wet Chenn” (“Remove the Chains”) they insist, “Get angry, break the chains”; “Ke’-m Pa Sote,” a song credited with precipitating the military junta’s downfall in 1990, wears its resistance in its title: “I Am Not Afraid.”)

But the sound of revolution is much more than the sum of Afro-Caribbean rhythms and political criticism. In Haiti, it also involves coming to terms with Countee Cullen’s question, “What is Africa to me?” In Haitian music, one’s relationship to Africa is central to the “sound of revolution,” and so the celebration of the Afro-Haitian vernacular—language (Creole), tradition (Vodou; kombit dance), religion (Vodou)—is paramount.

It’s no surprise, then, that Vodou Adjeye opens with “Se Kreyol Nou Ye” (“We’re Creole”), which criticizes Haitians who “would rather speak French, English, or Spanish rather than Creole.” The musicians declare “We’re Creole—we’ll never be ashamed of it” … “we’re people of the Kongo, let’s not be ashamed of it” and the galloping Vodou rhythms convince you they mean it. And in “Nou Pap Sa Bliye” (“We Won’t Forget This”) they come to the defense of Vodou: “They’re saying that it’s werewolf music/But we know that it’s a lie.” But so what if you don’t understand Creole?

The warm voices, bright guitar riffs, jittery synthesizer lines, and propulsive drumming will dissolve your regret. (I’m reminded of the many people who happily dance to Bob Marley’s lament “No Woman No Cry” and his protest “Get Up, Stand Up.” A welcome incongruity, if ever there was one. Music scholar Lynn Abbott once made an observation about Marley’s music that aptly applies to much Haitian music: “It reminds me of the Cajun Two-Step [dance style] that chugs merrily along while the guy is singing, ‘I’m condemned to walk down the big lonesome road for the rest of my days.’ ”) Yes, perhaps the revolution—or should I say Revolution?—will get lost in translation, but the sound of joyful defiance, that open secret, will prance right through.”…
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Some portions of this article were reformatted to enhance reading.

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Kamelit - "Racine Mapou De Azor" (Haitian Rara/Racine Music)

Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post showcases a video of the song "Racine Mapou De Azor" by the Haitian Racine/Rara band "Kamelit" and provides information about Rara/Racine music.

This post also provides information about Kamekit's lead drummer Lénord Fortuné, also known as "Azor".

Selected comments from this video's discussion thread are also included in this post.

This post is presented for folkloric, religious, cultural, entertainment, and aesthetic purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to Kemelit and its lead drummer Azor for their musical legacy. Thanks also to all those who are quoted in this post and thanks to the publisher of this video on YouTube.

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INFORMATION ABOUT RARA AND RARA/RACINE MUSIC
From http://haitianmusicsvideo.com/kamelit-racine-mapou-de-azor/
...."From Vodou to Compas to Racine to Rara and Beyond: Haiti became the first black-ruled republic in the Americas in 1804, and music has mirrored, and at times shaped, the twists and turns of Haitis politics and culture ever since. A primary source of Haitian culture is Dahomey, the birthplace of vodouthe most commonly held world view among Haitian people today. We explore how each of Haitis rulers has championed his own preferred music. The Duvalier dictators favored compas dance music, and suppressed the most African-identified cultural expressions. When Baby Doc was run out of the country in 1986, African-derived racine, or roots, music exploded.

Rara is a vibrant annual street festival in Haiti, when followers of the Afro-Creole religion called Vodou march loudly into public space to take an active role in politics.

During the six weeks between the eve of Lent and Easter Week, Haitian Rara bands take to the streets, offering the urban and rural poor of Haiti an opportunity to negotiate power under conditions of political and economic insecurity as well as publicly celebrate Vodoun religious culture. Through the performance of music, song, and dance during long parades of many miles, Rara bands serve participants and audiences by recalling to memory an oppressed and brutal past. Perhaps more crucially, these bands express much about the current realities of Haitian social, spiritual, and political life as they perform religious work for Voudoun spirits, solidify the notion of community through the patronage of local big men, and contest political oppression. In the Dominican Republic, this tradition is known as gaga.

Rara processions incorporate various types of musical instruments such as kongo or petro drums, twompet (trumpets), tcha-tcha (maracas), graj (metal scrapers), bells, kes (doubled headed and stick beaten, often with a snare like device), flutes, saxophones, and various kinds of rattles made from zinc such as the tchancy, a can filled with seeds. However, the leading instruments in these celebrations are the vaksin, cylindrical trumpets made of bamboo, and the klonet, made of hammered zinc and ending in a flared horn.

These bands are led by presidents, colonels, queens and other members of the complex rara hierarchies. The bands set out on foot from the ounfo (temple) onto the streets where they attract their followers. After the temple, they move from house to house collecting money and occasionally engaging in low level conflict with other groups. The groups are led by their president who has a whistle and a whip, which he uses to clear malevolent spirits from the path of the procession. Despite its seasonal association, rara may take place at any time of the year and animates political rallies, demonstrations and celebrations of all types. Rara processions have traveled with the Diaspora, so it is quite common to experience these celebrations in cities in the United States, Canada, and France, among others."
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I'm quoting most of this entire article for folkloric reasons as a means of helping to ensure that the information in this article is retained and shared.

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From http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_58204.shtml Kamelit "Racine Mapou De Azor" By Kamelit (Performers)
Directors JN Baptiste and Laurent Garry, Thursday, Jan 21, 2010
"This Haitian Style of music is called Racine/Rara, this video has been filmed in Haiti and the song was performed by the group Kamelit.

The rhythms of Racine and Rara are very similar if not the same, Racine is mainly used in Vodou ceremony while Rara is considered to be the marching bands. From Vodou to Compas to Racine to Rara and Beyond: Haiti became the first black-ruled republic in the Americas in 1804, and music has mirrored, and at times shaped, the twists and turns of Haitis politics and culture ever since.

... Rara is a vibrant annual street festival in Haiti, when followers of the Afro-Creole religion called Vodou march loudly into public space to take an active role in politics.

During the six weeks between the eve of Lent and Easter Week, Haitian Rara bands take to the streets, offering the urban and rural poor of Haiti an opportunity to negotiate power under conditions of political and economic insecurity as well as publicly celebrate Vodoun religious culture. Through the performance of music, song, and dance during long parades of many miles, Rara bands serve participants and audiences by recalling to memory an oppressed and brutal past. Perhaps more crucially, these bands express much about the current realities of Haitian social, spiritual, and political life as they perform religious work for Voudoun spirits, solidify the notion of community through the patronage of local big men, and contest political oppression. In the Dominican Republic, this tradition is known as gaga".

"Racine Mapou De Azor"
Filmed at Carnival 2007 in Haiti"
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*This article includes the video that is given below.
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I'm quoting this entire article for folkloric reasons as a means of helping to ensure that the information in this article is retained and shared.

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INFORMATION ABOUT THE TITLE OF THIS SONG AND INFORMATION ABOUT KAMELIT'S LEAD DRUMMER
I believe that the title "Racine Mapou De Azor" means "Racine Mapou music from [the drummer] Azor" - "Azor" was the name for the lead drummer of the Kamelit band.

Here's a quote that I found online about the word "mapou""
From http://www.kean.edu/~hsa/proverbs.html Haitian Proverbs
[Haitian proverb] "Mapou mouri, kabrit manje fey li:

When the mapou (oak-like tree) dies, goats would eat its leaves.

Meaning: This proverb is said in Creole to recall the scene of old age. It is also said to compare the prime and the declining days as well as abundance and poverty. If a youngster has been disrespectful to an old man mapou who is past his prime, that proverb would be an appropriate remark.

Note: the mapou has a special meaning in Haitian culture. It is a sacred tree for the believers of Vaudou."
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Given that information, my guess is that the word "mapou" in this title reinforces the belief that Racine music is sacred.

Here's some information about the drummer "Azor":
From http://worldmusiccentral.org/2011/07/28/a-giant-of-haitian-music-lenord-fortune-azor-dies-at-46/ "A GIANT OF HAITIAN MUSIC LÉNORD FORTUNÉ ‘AZOR’ DIES AT 46"
JULY 28, 2011 WORLD MUSIC CENTRAL NEWS DEPARTMENT
"Lénord Fortuné - Azor

Haitian master drummer and singer Lénord Fortuné, also known as Azor, died July 16. He was 46. Azor was given a state funeral and he was posthumously decorated by Haiti’s president Michel Martelly.
“Haiti has lost one of the most popular virtuosos of music of the past 50 years and a tireless Ambassador of Haitian culture,” said President Michel Martelly. “With Vodou music as a backdrop, the group that he led and which bears his name, Racine Mapou of Azor, traveled around the world and enabled all to discover the value of the music lakous (yard music) and the Haitian identity.

Thanks to him this music, entered in a long enclave, shows and is appreciated by millions in both Haitian and foreign music lovers.”

Lénord Fortuné was born June 19, 1965. He became one of the most popular musicians in Haiti and toured the world showcasing the traditional rasin (also known as racine) music and dances of Haiti. In addition, Azor’s music videos introduced Haitian music to wider audiences."...

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SHOWCASE VIDEO: Kamelit "Racine Mapou De Azor"



PRIDESOFHAITI, Uploaded on Oct 18, 2009

This Haitian Style of music is called Racine/Rara, this video has been filmed in Haiti and the song was performed by the group Kamelit.
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Here are selected comments from this video's discussion thread.
These comments are presented in relative chronological order with the oldest dated comment given first excerpt for replies. Numbers have been assigned to these comments for referencing purposes only,

2009
1. conceptartandcode
"my friend this is not rara this pure vodoo music ou mizik rasin .... rara music is playing by raram ,foula, bourara...

anyway good post!"

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Reply
2. PRIDESOFHAITI
"I am glad that you brought this to my attention but in my opinion there is not a whole lot of difference between the two.

I believe that racine is much more spiritual than rara.
I would even say that rara is almost like a marketed version of racine.

But like they say here in America, if it walks and quack like a duck it must be a duck."

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Reply
3. negkreyol21
"haha its the same thing you are just mentioning artist every one makes their music differently thats how it goes"

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Reply
4. conceptartandcode
"nope my friend they are not the same thing.... well it's up to you if u don;;t want to beleive it."

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Reply
5. conceptartandcode
"like u said it's in your opinion...but that doesn't mean your opinion is the truth ...yes there is not a lot a difference btwn the thow but they are 2 separate groove ....anyway you welcome i invite u to do more researches and ask some well aware people maybe they will tell u..."

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Reply
6. MrHiaiti
"kite jouda pale..racine mapou the best racine group of all time... and this completely different from rara"
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From http://mymemory.translated.net/en/Haitian-Creole-French/English/kite-yo-pale [translations from Haitian Creole to English] "kite yo pale" = "Let them speak"

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2010
Reply
7. jubilee203
"Same thing. RaRa is a continuation of a voodoo ceremony on foot or band version. In a ceremony azor would be considered the hougan. He is responsible to talk to the lwa thru singing. In ceremonies only the drum is used mostly. But right after the voodoo ceremony all the participants would get on foot, with the additional instrument like the vaksin, making the rara. So they can go to the cemetery to pay homage to the dead. Unlike band a pied, rara only come out during voodoo season in december."

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8. CCSFMusic25
"This is wonderful - thank you so much for the historical information as well as the beautiful music video!"

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2011
9. Pierre Henri Dalencour
"Respect Azor!!!! Ayibobo pou ou!!!!"
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(Google Translate) Haitian Creole to English:
"Ayibobo pou ou!!!!" - "Congratulations to you !!!!"

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10. Zaafirah013
"R.I.P. Azor. Although You will be missed by so many, your contributions to racine pap jam mouri."
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(Google Translate) Haitian Creole to English:
"pap jam mouri" = "can never die."

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2012
11. DIEGO MANJARREZ4 years ago
"Esta musica no tiene nada que ver con las 21 divisiones?"
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(Google Translate) From Spanish to English:
"This music has nothing to do with the 21 divisions?"

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Reply
12. Samuel Laguerre3
"si y no a la misma ves. eso viene de la cultura haitiana. el vodou haitiano en lo cual se encuentra 21 nationes. las 21 divisiones es version dominicana del vodou haitiano y como los dos tiene sus raices en africa por eso se ve muy parecido aunque es differente
-snip-
(Google Translate) From Spanish to English:
"Yes and no at the same time. That comes from the Haitian culture. The Haitian vodou in which is 21 nations. The 21 divisions is Dominican version of Haitian vodou and as the two have their roots in africa that is why it looks very similar although it is different"

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2014
13. Stephan Sainvil
"Racine Mapou will remain forever the best of the best."

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14. Tim Rowley
"Amazing. Racine Mapou de Azor have been my favourite Haitian sound since I found them on the album "Rhythms of Rapture" [Smithsonian Folkways].
I'm always trying to guess how many drummers i hear, as most temple music has three drums. I'd love to watch the band playing."

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Reply
15. Stanley Dougé, 2016
"he died unfortunately in 2011"

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16. Ray Mercedes, 2017
"ayibobo"
(Google Translate) Haitian Creole to English:
"Ayibobo" = "Congratulations"

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