A couple of weeks before our Christmas break, Ian Evans (the son of John Evans, BCD’s school psychologist ) came to an electronic music class to talk about a project that he has been involved with over the past couple of years. Ian is an old friend of mine and is a gifted keyboardist and more recently, producer and composer. He has been going to Haiti on a regular basis to seek out musicians and vocalists to collaborate with and produce recordings with them. His method has been to work with friends in the U.S. to create the instrumental tracks, and then to go to Haiti to find people to record the singing and free styling on top of that. He has a portable recording studio that consists of a MacBook and a microphone plus interface (that all run off of the computer’s battery), and he takes it to the streets to record the vocals. He literally meets people everywhere he goes that are willing to put on a pair of headphones, choose their favorite backing track, and just start singing or rapping right on the spot.
The music that Ian played for us was incredible, a mixture of modern hip hop, funk, and hints of the island styles which are native to the Caribbean, with very inspired vocal parts. Participants range from young kids to experienced and recognized artists from Haiti. Ian pointed out that since there is a low literacy rate in this poor nation, people generally rely on their verbal communication and are very quick with words as well as having the ability to absorb a lot of information from the spoken word. They speak a language that is called creole, a blend of French and African dialects that has evolved into their own language. It was hard to interpret what was being sung in the recordings that Ian played for us, but we really enjoyed the music and Ian related the basic content of the songs.
The idea is that some of the interested students who take the electronic music class can work on compositions with the intention that they may be used for Ian’s project, and hopefully will have vocals from the streets of Haiti added to them. We have taken the past three weeks to form three groups of four students each to collaborate on tracks to send to Ian for this project. So far the raw materials for the three pieces have been recorded and we will be spending the next two classes learning how to arrange, mix, and master the tracks. Then we will email the audio files to Ian down in Haiti and he will take them and add them to his collection of backing music, at which point, a lucky Haitian will hopefully select a BCD track to sing to. A true international collaboration!
