Rara Band - Photo: © Alain-Christian

Haitian music encompasses a vast spectrum from folk to rap, reflecting a fusion of numerous cultural influences, West African, Latin from Cuba and the Dominican Republic, jazz and rap from the United States. Vodou ceremonies, carnival and dance music have been the main performance fora.

Perhaps the most essential ingredient to all Haitian music is rhythm with drumming being an essential ingredient to all vodou ceremonies, with three basic drums, the manman, segon and boula combining in different rhythms to welcome individual lwa (god).

The Haitian folk music known as rara is also percussion-driven, the basic sound created by musicians playing single note trumpets made of bamboo tubes (vaskins) and home made konet, hammered zinc tubes with a flared horn at the end. Players blow through a mouthpiece while striking the side of the instrument to reinforce the rhythm which is complemented by others on drums, maracas, and striking pieces of metal and glass bottles.

Rara music has been described as primeval, and as music on the move it is most associated with carnival, although rara bans can be heard any time of the year anywhere from Port-au-Prince to small villages. It is complemented by music known as twoubadou music, with peripatetic troubadours playing some combination of guitar, beat box and accordion singing ballads of Haitian, French or Caribbean origin.

Dance music in Haiti has been influenced by son from Cuba and merengue from the Dominican Republic but in the mid-1950s two Haitian dance band leaders altered the merengue beat to form a new genre known as konpa (compa). Sometimes seen as Haitian “big band” music, it is certainly Haiti’s most successful commercial genre but has been somewhat reinvented in the past twenty years by Michel Martelly, “Sweet Micky” a singer and keyboard player, running for President in November 2010.

One final more recent musical genre: rasin or roots music. Influenced by Bob Marley reggae, Jimmy Hendrix and Carlos Santana style guitar, rasin uses vodou drumming rhythms with call and response vocals. It is the most political of Haiti’s musical styles having evolved during the dictatorships of the 1980s and 90s. Bands such as Foula, Kampech, RAM and Boukman Eksperyans have taken rasin music all over the world with lyrics that criticized the military and sung the praises of Haitian peasant culture and belief.

As radio and the diaspora have spread American soul, hip-hop and rap music in Haiti, the country has developed its own leading exponents. The most renowned exponents were the Fugees, led by Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel, two Haitian Americans who had left the country for New Jersey as children.  Jean’s solo album, The Carnival, with four songs in Haitian (Kreyol), spawned a clutch of Haitian language rap groups who have become hugely popular.