Saxophonist Godwin Louis had an epiphany when he came to New
Orleans to study at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz. He explored the
city’s music--and kept getting an eerie sense of familiarity. “My mother and
father are from Haiti, and though I was born in the States, I lived in
Port-au-Prince for a few years in the 1990s,” recounts Louis. “When I moved to
New Orleans, I felt that similarity everywhere, in the presence of Catholicism,
the funeral marches, the second-line culture, the spiritual traditions tied to
vodoun. I said, this is incredible. Where does this similarity come from?”
The answers turned out to be Global (release: Febuary 22,
2019), Louis’ first major release of his compositions and work as a band
leader. Louis discovered the impact of Haitians on the music of New Orleans,
arguably the musical heart of the US, and with it a history of Haitian presence
going back to the French Colonial and Haitian Revolutionary period. Yet as
Louis dug into the past, his understanding and musical vision expanded
geographically and sonicly, as DNA tests led him to West and Central Africa
(“Nago-Kongo”), Brazil, tiny Pacific islands--the entire global filigree of
Afro-diasporic peoples and their art.
The resulting double-album of original compositions (with
one anthemic concluding piece by composer Hermeto Pascoal) plumbs the past
while remaining steadily grounded in contemporary and exploratory musical
practices, that improvisatory, ever-fresh edge of jazz. A seasoned
sideman--Louis’ touring history reads like a who’s who of jazz and pop--Louis
felt it was time to bring his discoveries, in breathtakingly intricate and
skillfully rendered form, to the world.
“My travels and studies let me fully explore and find this
musical sound dedicated to the diaspora that you hear on Global,” says Louis.
“The world is way more connected than we think. We’ve all heard of the
Transatlantic trade slave and its tragedies and horrors, but so much came out
of it and formed global culture, so much that’s rarely highlighted. You can
feel it intensely in places like Santiago de Cuba, Bahia in Brazil, New
Orleans, in L’artibonite, Haiti. The musical sound that came from those places
has gone global, and it’s all filtered into pop culture. That’s where I
started.”
Born in Harlem, Louis remembers encountering the beauties of
jazz via his guitarist uncle, Robert “Magic” Saint Fleur. He marveled at his
uncle’s ability to improvise and wanted to know his secret. “I was really drawn
to that element of improvisation,” recalls Louis. “I would hear him riff off a
song, and it seemed like the most incredible thing, how he came up with all
these beautiful melodies on the spot. It showcased such knowledge of the songs
and total mastery of the instrument.” His uncle encouraged him, then turned him
on to Charlie Parker, and Louis was hooked.
He studied at Berklee and made an admirable name for himself
among jazz’s creme de la creme. Though relatively young, Louis has already
toured, performed, and recorded with Herbie Hancock, Clark Terry, Roger
Dickerson, Ron Carter, Al Foster, Jack Dejohnette, Jimmy Heath, Billy Preston,
Patti Labelle, Toni Braxton, Babyface, Madonna, Gloria Estefan, Barry Harris,
Howard Shore, David Baker, Mulatu Astakte, Mahmoud Ahmed, Wynton Marsalis, and
Terence Blanchard, among others, seeing a great swath of Africa, Asia, and
Europe in the bargain.
As Louis developed his own style, where gospel and
traditional Haitian and West and Central African songs, avant arrangements and
grounded grooves collide, he discovered new concepts in African-heritage
musical thought that enriched his jazz foundations. Fellow musicians in Mali,
for example, based melodic phrases on underlying texts, not on arbitrary
numbers of beats or bars.“Because it’s all based on the words, there's no
common tempo,” explains Louis. “When the phrase is done, it’s done and then you
move on. I decided to experiment with approaching notes the same way. An idea
can keep on going. In general, Global questions tradition: Why should the form
be one way and not another? If the idea isn’t done yet, it goes on, even when
another idea comes. The melody is king in that approach.” The resulting feel is
polyphonous, many different voices and perspectives chiming in and overlapping.
The overlap fascinates Louis and inspired many of Global’s
pieces. He reveals into how European sacred music seeped into an Afro-diasporic
melody found around the Atlantic, rich with triple meter. (“Four Essential
Prayers of Guinea”) And how, in counterpoint, African instruments can inform
Protestant hymns, despite centuries of church animosity toward West African
sounds and forms. (“Bondye Ede-n”) He looks at narrative threads that unite the
lyrical forms of Afro-Caribbean and Afro-South American romance (“Present”
featuring Cuban singer Xiomara Laugart), and the playing techniques and moods
that unite the Francophone cultures of the Caribbean (“Siwèl”).
Yet the wide-ranging journeys remain rooted in Louis’
personal experience as a person with a multilayered heritage and full awareness
of past and present struggles. As the composer noted regarding the album’s
title suite (“Global, Parts I and II”): “This is about my traveling experiences
all over the world. I’ve been to 100 countries as of now. I have so many
stories, some sad, some triumphant. So did our ancestors,” Louis reflects.
“Sonically, I wanted to pay homage to some of our lesser-known ancestors that
contributed to the development of music in Europe. People like Joseph Boulogne,
Chevaliers De Saint-Georges who was a brilliant composer during the classical
era. Overall, Global is the history of music and culture in the Americas.
Cultures that came from Africa, met with indigenous aestheticism, and were
refined or rarefied via colonialism, as a result changing the course of music
history and culture worldwide.”
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