Leyla McCalla
Album: Vari-Colored Songs
Label: Dixie Frog
Tracks: 14
Website: http://www.leylamccalla.com

Singer and cellist Leyla, a New York native of Haitian descent now residing in New Orleans, is best known as a latter-day regular touring member of the celebrated Afro-American string band outfit Carolina Chocolate Drops, but on this solo outing she pays direct and sincere tribute to Langston Hughes, influential poet/novelist/playwright/columnist and social activist whose benchmark work was key to the profile of the Harlem Renaissance, a literary and artistic movement that fostered a new black cultural identity in the 1920s and 30s through ideals of brotherhood, friendship and cooperation. Leyla's own heritage, and her connection with Black, Caribbean and Creole culture, are explored here through the performance of music written to Hughes' poetry, which is presented alongside a small number of traditional Haitian folk songs and a couple of original songs penned by Leyla herself, in a compelling cross-pollination of African-American folk-blues traditions with Leyla's own specific Haitian roots.

The overall sound of this disc may be stark and intimate, but its demeanour is soulful and gently heartfelt, with Leyla's own vocals, cello, tenor banjo and guitar selectively augmented on a majority of the tracks by fellow-CCD-members Rhiannon Giddens and Hubby Jenkins and/or other musicians who contribute occasional pedal steel, fiddle, slide guitar, tenor banjo and/or bass. But it's probably Leyla's two purely solo performances that stick in the memory the most - certainly, Song For A Dark Girl, strategically placed at the very heart of the disc, forms one of its standout moments, and the fervent self-penned entreaty When I Can See The Valley another.

Hughes' status as an early innovator of jazz poetry is brilliantly caught by Leyla's sympathetic and conducive settings, not only by virtue of the syncopated rhythms that mirror both the climate and internal movement of the original poems. From the metaphysical musings of Search and the outright despondency of Too Blue to the tellingly simple portrait of Girl, Leyla captures in her settings the intrinsic poetry of Hughes' lines, while on Lonely House (which uses Kurt Weill's quintessentially arthouse-cabaret musical setting) Leyla capitalises on its forlorn jazzy ambience after a pindrop acappella opening, providing in the process another disc highlight. The handful of traditional pieces coexist impeccably with the Hughes settings; some, like the vital, percussive Latibonit and the spirited Kamèn Sa W Fè?, are sung in the relevant patois, and all prove mightily irresistible. As indeed does the exemplary and abundantly attractive packaging, which houses a really handsome booklet befitting the CD's status as a triumphant, true labour of love for Leyla, this artefact containing full texts and credits as well as a brace of illuminating short essays.

This is a most stimulating release, though (sadly) appearing just a whisker too late for voting into this year's best-of lists but a sure-fire candidate for early inclusion in next year's.

David Kidman