As the husband-and-wife duo behind Haiti’s premier international musical event, Joel Widmaier and Milena Sandler Widmaier are used to presenting major jazz celebrities: Branford Marsalis, Jed Levy Quartet, Julie Michels of Canada. and Cuba’s Gonzalo Rubalcaba, to name a few.
But for years, there was one star in the jazz universe they could never seem to get: Miami-born Cécile McLorin Salvant.
So last year, as the couple began planning for this year’s 13th edition of the Port-au-Prince International Jazz Festival, they did something unusual.
“We went to the family,” Sandler Widmaier said. “It’s not like us to do that but I sent a message to her mother and said, ‘I don’t understand why we can’t get her. We have been asking a year in advance to get her, not only for the jazz festival, but for International Jazz Day as well, and every time the answer is ‘No.’ If she doesn’t want to, OK, and I will stop bothering the agent.’ “
Léna McLorin Salvant responded on behalf of her daughter: “She wants to. Haiti is really dear to her.”
And this is how after five years of trying, the PAP Jazz Festival, which kicks off this weekend and runs through Jan. 26, landed one of jazz music’s most-watched artists, Cécile McLorin Salvant, who also happens to be part Haitian.
“We usually have headliners who are always foreigners. Now, it’s a Haitian,” said Sandler Widmaier, who has long tracked McLorin Salvant’s rise from virtual unknown to 2010 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition winner to multiple Grammy Award winner. “She is the one female jazz singer that everybody wants right now, and so we are really proud to have her, really happy.”
For McLorin Salvant, 29, playing the festival is not just long overdue, it’s a chance to go back to her roots, both as a musician and as the the daughter of a Haitian physician and a French-Guadeloupean mother.
“There is always this idea of reconnecting, of re-familiarizing yourself,” she said. “Haiti is not that huge but culturally it has given so much to the world; if you look at the history of jazz too, Haiti and Haitian music is super-fundamental to early, early jazz in New Orleans. It’s fundamental to Cuban music, to all kinds of music that ended up influencing jazz either directly or indirectly.”
Haiti, she said, is a huge part of her life. “My dad is Haitian, a lot of my friends growing up were Haitian American, children of Haitian immigrants. So it is integral to who I am as a person. However, it is the identity of a Haitian American, of someone who is not from that country, but yet who feels that country in their ancestry and in their traditions.”
So what can jazz aficionados expect from McLorin Salvant when she takes the stage at the Karibe Hotel on Sunday, a day after five-time Grammy Award composer and trumpeter Terence Blanchard officially kicks off the eight-day festival before foreign diplomats and visiting jazz fanatics?
“We are going to play,” said McLorin Salvant, who dismisses talk that she’s the next Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughn or Ella Fitzgerald. “There’s a lot of feeding off of the moment and off of the audience and the musicians. For me it’s not something that’s calculated or planned in advance. We have a set of songs that we are probably going to do, a lot of things in French. But who knows what is going to happen. That is probably part of the appeal as well, having music that is heavily improvised.”
It’s this spontaneous creativity and energy that musicians like McLorin Salvant bring, said Sandler Widmaier, that makes the jazz festival not just eclectic but a must-attend event in a country struggling to lure tourists amid recent changes in travel advisories from both the U.S. State Department and Canada that warn their citizens to reconsider travel to Haiti.
Such warnings, organizers say, have not dampened their enthusiasm for the event or the caliber of musicians its attracts.
“For us, we have the ambition of becoming the festival of the Caribbean,” Sandler Widmaier said. “And for that you need headliners, we need to be a reference. If we don’t have big names, we can’t be a reference.”
In addition to McLorin Salvant and Blanchard, this year’s s festival will also feature arranger and pianist Alex Mercado of Mexico; soprano and alto saxophonist Émile Parisien of France; violinist Chelsey Green and the Green Project from the United States; and English soul and R&B singer Joss Stone.
“I know every year I say we have an incredible lineup, but I really think that we have it this year,” Sandler Widmaier said. “There are going to be a lot of jam sessions because of the musicians we have. We really feel that these are musicians who want to do that.”
Sandler Widmaier said one of the nicest surprises they got this year was when Stone’s people reached out asking if she could be part of this year’s lineup. But the singer, who is embarking on a world tour, wasn’t just interested in singing. She asked to be teamed with both a young Haitian artist she could perform with during her visit and a charity that she could give back to. After being given several choices in both categories, Stone chose Coralie Hérard, a promising young Haitian singer, composer and guitarist and the LGBT-rights group, Kouraj (Courage).
“It’s amazing,” Sandler Widmaier said, adding that initially she thought the inquiry was a joke from Stone, who is paying her own way to the festival and not taking a fee. Continue reading