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Hard on the heels of Mélissa Laveaux’s Radyo Siwèl comes another slice of Haitian history: a loose concept album about the Haitian revolution against French rule, which began in August 1791 and produced the western hemisphere’s first free republic of people of African heritage. RAM is named for its founder, Richard Morse, a US citizen of part-Haitian descent who manages Port-au-Prince’s Hotel Oloffson. A favoured haunt of journalists, politicians and spies (it was the model for Graham Greene’s Hotel Trianon in The Comedians), RAM is its house band. For nearly three decades, they have been picking fights with the authorities, first backing Jean-Bertrand Aristide against Raoul Cédras; then sharply criticising Aristide. Along the way, the band’s members have survived many threats of assassination and at least one actual attempt.
August 1791 is firmly in the territory of mizik rasin, a Haitian blend of vodou and Creole folk music with rock instrumentation. Morse and his wife Lunise share lead vocals, a whole host of drummers beat out syncopated trance rhythms, and Yonel Vendredi sprays high zouk guitar lines over the top as brass and backing singers chorus the responses. The songs trace Haiti’s history backwards to Africa: “Danmbala Elouwe”, the opener, is a ceremonial song from Dahomey that implores a spirit to breathe life into the dying. And the meaning of the African dialect of “Seyiko Evida” has been lost to time, even though the song is still sung. Traditional herbalism is to the fore in “Otsya”, an advertisement for the atiayo leaf, used in Haiti for conditions from headache to vertigo, as well as for divination and the sealing of contracts (“se fèy simen kontra”).
Elsewhere, the revolution is brought to life. On “Badji Feray” two fighters debate who should take up the leadership should the “Black Jacobin”, Toussaint L’Ouverture, be captured. With powerful singing from Lunise Morse, “Maledve O” recalls a massacre. The skipping drums and organ blurts of “Dawomen Dakò” recall Creole Haitians joining with Africans to fight the French. It ends with bleats of raras, the single-note horns that feature at the centre of vodou ceremonies. Vodou can also be heard, poignantly, in the petwo drums on “Negrès Katye Moren”, a song popularised by Richard Morse’s recently deceased mother, the singer Emerante de Pradines.
★★★★☆