Leyla McCalla (from the album Breaking the Thermometer

Leyla McCalla (from the album Breaking the Thermometer available on Anti- Records) (by Bryant Liggett)
Leyla McCalla latest album is a solid package of music, politics, and cultural awareness. On Breaking the Thermometer, the one-time Carolina Chocolate Drop, New-Orleans based, Haitian American musician fuses traditional tunes with audio soundbites of old-school broadcasts and 21st Century interviews along with her own original music to create a sound collage that drops like a score to a political documentary. Despite some of the audio soundbites being decades old, this plays out as fresh as next week and as current as right now. It’s great.
Leyla McCalla’s cello is aggressive, bold, and beautiful on the opener in “Nan Fon Bwa”, where she airs a conversation that explores Haitian identity; its punky-political and borderless rhythms. There’s plucked banjo and Creole-language sung lyrics in “Fort Dimanche” as she soundtracks Afrobeat rhythms in “Le Bal est Fini” and “Dodinin” while “You Don’t Know Me” and “Memory Song” are one of many ambient ballads.
Then there’s the animated throwbacks like “Jean and Michele” and “Still Looking”, the former a Creole spoken-word blast of old-school audio, the latter a 23-second audio blip, both serving as sound-bridges that weave the record together.
With Leyla’s instrumentation, both old-school and modern Roots, McCalla has made a smart record with Breaking the Thermometer that utilizes a wealth of audio and original melodies exploring identity, culture, and people. It’s world spanning rhythms fused with sound-bite samples and plucked Roots strings, all original and all awesome. (by Bryant Liggett)
 
Listen and buy the music of Leyla McCalla from AMAZON
 
For more information and purchase options, please visit the Delbert McClinton website

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