Overdubs begin!

Thanks to the schedule flexibility of our friends Nico Jolliet and Zach Niles at Lakou Mizik Studio in Port Au Prince, we were able to record Beken’s vocal tracks last week and they’ve now come safely home to roost on our East Nashville studio hard drives.  Upon opening each Pro Tools session, I pressed the space bar and was instantly drawn back into all of the mystery and urgency that first attracted me to the maestro’s music over two years ago.

Overdubs here in East Nashville will take a couple of weeks, and after a break next month for a brief Australian tour with Emmylou we’ll be solidly in mix mode.

Beken vox session 1

Beken vox session 2

Duckens Dauphin @ Beken vox session

Recording at Lakou Mizik Studio

Phase one of the Beken sessions at Lakou Mizik Studio finished last Saturday evening in Port Au Prince.  Though we were able to get most of the basic tracks we needed from Duckens, the maestro himself was put on voice rest by his doctor on Thursday so we must wait another week or so for any lead vocals.  This is a frustrating but not insurmountable problem – our engineer Nicolas Jolliet will be in PAP through the end of the month, and by the time Beken does return to the studio for his vocals (presumably next week) he will have had time to live with the basic tracks and rehearse his performances.

Though enormous amounts of diplomacy and negotiation are frequently required to actually get music recorded, what we are able to hear and capture is nothing short of amazing.

Link here to some photos of the sessions by Allison Shelley and a very cool video Nico assembled of Saturday’s activities.  More photos from the week are located here on my Flickr photostream.

Day One – yet more meetings & Lakou Mizik Studio setup

7.30am
Was able to only nap intermittently overnight.  My sparsely furnished room is clean and cool, and shares a roof with the single-room housekeeper’s quarters currently housing a family of four (including two young boys).  Took half of a shower (the water cut off), got reorganized, then left with Christian and Zach to meet Beken for breakfast at the Kinam.

9am
Beken brings to the Kinam a gentleman who seems to be acting as transcriber/manager, and whose name no one can seem to understand (Christian included). Beken asks for some further clarifications about certain clauses in his contract.  The meeting ends on a confident note.

1.30pm
After leaving the Kinam and stopping for groceries, the 20-minute drive back from Petionville to the studio takes well over an hour, and en route we change vehicles once and drivers three times, one of whom yields the driver’s seat of the Trooper only to jump in back and ride along with the groceries.

Steeve Valcourt, a commanding singer and guitarist involved in Zach’s Lakou Mizik project, has arrived at the studio in our absence with a small entourage.  He works with Nico and myself to test mic placements, etc.  Beken’s son Deakens also turns up to survey the studio.  He is pleasant, reserved, and a Lionel Richie fan.  There is intermittent singing and jamming as the day’s heat peaks and we retire to the balcony with to await Beken.

 

Arrival/Studio

An easy flight down to Haiti except for the very early start (awake at 2.30 am and out the door at 4.15), and for accidentally leaving my wallet in my Osprey pack when I was coerced to check it at the gate in Miami.  Fortunately the wallet and its contents were all intact when I collected it off the belt in the chaotic and only loosely guarded baggage claim area just outside the PAP immigration kiosks.

Zach and Faubert picked me up from the airport and we drove straight on to the colonial-styled villa that Zach has just leased as an impromptu, Exile On Main Street-style studio and lodge.  Was met there by our engineer Nico (SUI/CAN) and his wife Kyra (CAN), the Lakou Mizik video producer Brietta (AUS), and zanmi pam Christian (must have hugged him a hundred times).  Filmmakers Jon Bougher and Kohl Threlkeld (US) dropped by later in the afternoon for rum and conversation.  We discussed how best to introduce the notion of shooting film and still photos of to the wary Beken, and then all retired to a supper of chicken, slaw, and sweet potatoes.

Returning to Haiti

As the Americana Music Conference takes over downtown Nashville this week, I’m en route to Port Au Prince for a few long-awaited days of recording sessions with Beken.  It took most of last spring to sort out his contractual business, and since signing with Thirty Tigers Music last June Beken has been diligently writing and rehearsing with his small ensemble.

Zach Niles has been working diligently for several days to set up a studio for us in a house located not far from the Oloffson Hotel in the center of the city.  We’ve got a good selection of mics and some Focusrite preamps on site, so my own cartage consists of an M-Box Pro (which fits perfectly inside a Pedaltrain Nano soft case), a firewire drive, and a handful of cables crammed on top of some socks and t-shirts in my Osprey bag (thanks to Leo Babauta for the packing wisdom), and the Kala U-Bass in case I decide to play along during tracking:

There will of course be more posts and photo/video updates to come this week.

Leaving Haiti

I didn’t sleep well in the Florita.  It seemed every twenty minutes that the silence was broken either by a moto roaring down the street or the two dogs that barked furiously at every single passerby.  After dozing from approximately 1-5am, I collected my things and met a moto-driver friend of Bonga’s who took me to the central Jakmel depot nearby.  Even at 6am it was madness, plus this time I had to negotiate my own rate in Kreyol and make sure that I wasn’t separated from my duffel.

The trip back to PAP was long, slow, and cramped, plus we had to listen to two salesmen that barked their product pitches (English lessons and medicine) at the top of their lungs for nearly all of the last hour of the trip.  My hookup with Christian at the PAP depot was smooth, and he and I had time for an omelette and a Prestige before I crossed the street and entered Toussaint L’Ouverture Airport.

At the last security checkpoint prior to boarding the flight for Miami, a young security guard saw the vinyl album image on my T-shirt and asked if I was a DJ. I managed to communicate in Kreyol that I was a musician and had been hanging out with Beken for a week, and he responded with a laugh and a few lines of “Fanm Se Kajou”.

I spent most of the time in the air today organizing my video files and my thoughts prior to briefing Thirty Tigers later this week.

View from the Florita Hotel balcony

Jakmel, Voudou

Christian met me at first light and we moto-taxied to the bus depot in the heart of PAP – a rugged, congested lot of insanity, diesel fumes, hucksters, and vendors.  I had paid for two seats in the van so I could keep my luggage with me, and after fourteen other passengers stuffed themselves into the vehicle we begun our escape from downtown via rugged, labyrinthine alleyways with axle-killing potholes hidden beneath surfaces of brown-gray water.

My conspicuousness as a blan (white foreigner) sitting in the front seat of the van at eye-level made this part of the journey seem five-times as long as it actually was, but after twenty minutes we had reached the coastal highway that eventually veered south and sent us into the mountains separating PAP from Jakmel and the opposite coast of the penisula.  The vistas in the mountains were plummeting and spectacular, the roadway twisting and marked by speed bumps and small villages.

Bonga was waiting at the Jakmel depot with his moto, and we were fortunately able to fit my larger Osprey duffel in between his legs as I climbed on behind him for the short trip to the Florita Hotel.

Aside from a few areas of heavier traffic and bustle, Jakmel is a sleepy and spooky little town that makes New Orleans’ Vieux Carre seem modern by comparison.  I dropped my duffel in my hotel room and then hopped back on the moto headed for Bonga’s studio, a cramped concrete cabana in which we came upon four other artist friends.  Sitting on the floor we all shared a meal of bread, bananas, and cafe Kreyol, and as we ate we began an aural exchange of Haitian Konpa and American hip-hop (A Tribe Called Quest went over particularly well).  Selling their art didn’t seem all that important to this crew – they seemed quite happy merely to paint as a way to pass the days.

We left the studio around 11am, and Bonga rode us about fifteen minutes down the western road to the campus of the Cine Institute, where I got to meet Andrew Bigosinski for the first time after many months of Beken-related emailing and Skype calling.  The southern-facing campus overlooks the Caribbean from atop a cliff about forty steps above a rocky shoreline alcove.  I was invited to a savory and spicy lunch of pasta and beet salad along with three faculty members, two of whom had put their lives in Spain on hold for an eight-month teaching engagement at the Institute.

I spent the rest of the afternoon loitering on the veranda and taking advantage of the abundant coffee, sea air, and wifi.  Bonga and myself, joined intermittently by Andrew, had a prolonged conversation about Beken’s tumultuous and tragic personal history and I got for the first time a direct account of how his music have underscored and given voice to the collective suffering of the Haitian people.

After sunset I rode back to the Florita in the back of Andrew’s jeep.  We shared a quick beer, and then shortly after he left Bonga arrived to take me to a ceremony at his neighborhood’s vodou temple.

The humble but colorful temple was hidden away from the street and laid out underneath a large tent made of USAID tarps.  The broad smiles of the head priest who was clearly delighted to see me there (we had met earlier in the day during prep for the ceremony) went a long way toward helping me get over my outsider’s shyness.  My presence definitely raised the eyebrows of the other attendees but I suspect this was more out of surprise than wariness.  At one point, Bonga dragged me directly out in between the drummers and dancers so I could get a clearer view of the tanbou wizardry on display, and as we were squeezing into the crowd on the opposite side of the tent I accidentally stepped on a woman’s bare feet with my hiking boots.  She was irritated but polite as I profusely apologized.

B-roll, negotiations, brotherhood

Today I was able to tag along with the film crew (minus Zach) for the day while they shot B-roll footage.  We proceeded first to Fort Jacques, a 200+ year-old bastion with a commanding view of the entire Port au Prince region and the sea, and stopped for lunch in Fermathe before heading back down the mountain to capture a closer cityscape view from the ruins of the Castel Hotel.

We accessed the Castel Hotel site via a medium-sized tent encampment.  Bonga had relatives living there which ensured that we had privileges to enter.  The entire slope from the tents to the cliffside terrace was one enormous, jagged pile of rubble that stretched into the middle distance and I was grateful to have changed into sturdy boots. As Bonga, Belony, and Belgard (the B3s) filmed the vista, a family of black goats sifted through the dust and concrete for something edible and I made small talk in Kreyol with Bonga’s aunt and twelve year-old niece.

Once the B3s got footage they were after, we said goodbye to Bonga’s relatives and made a quick descent into the heart of Port au Prince to drive by the presidential palace.  The remains of this structure are categorically beyond repair and are in the painfully slow process of being demolished and cleared.  Directly across the street from the palace gates is the eastern edge of Champ de Mars Plaza, the largest tent city in Port au Prince.  I hardly thought we’d see its end as we headed back into the hills.

We next collected Zach, dropped off Bonga and his two mates at their cramped single-room guest house down a winding urban alleyway, and then Christian, Zach, Makens (our driver) and myself sat out the first gentle rain of the week drinking Prestige and rum cocktails at a cafe owned by Christian’s friends.

The happy hour softened some of the rougher memories of the day but it was not to last for long – around 6pm we had an impromptu meeting with Beken at the Hotel Kinam which became intense and at times very frustrating.  Over the past few days we’ve been going with the flow as his permissions and plans have repeatedly changed, sometimes by the minute.  Tonight’s point of contention for Beken was allowing us to hear and record (for demo purposes) his new songs written since the earthquake.

Some of his cynicism and defensiveness are understandable. He must wonder why a group of “blans” he’s never met would be so interested in his music in the first place, and I’m sure that he’s overwhelmed by the thought of navigating a recording contract in English (he speaks none).

The task at hand, then, has been to make him understand that our intentions are honorable – we’ve been working for well over almost two years to see his album and a promotional film come to fruition simply because we are all inspired by his music and his story – and that withholding this material from us goes against his best interests.  This task has mainly fallen on Christian Aramy who was, during tonight’s meeting at least, the hardest working man in show business.

At least for now, Beken continues to remain stubborn.  He’s due to visit my apartment in the morning, and it’s hard to know what will happen if and when he arrives for our scheduled pre-production session.

* * *

Sunday 13 Nov, 11.46pm

It has been a remarkable and emotionally turbulent day.

Beken arrived at my flat this morning complaining of ill health and made it clear that he would not be able to sing and play with his usual force.  After some small talk about his symptoms, he tuned his guitar and the film crew began to assemble their gear.

They had hardly gotten the lapel mic on Beken’s shirt and the camera on its tripod before he launched into a piece of music we hadn’t heard before, and we all literally scrambled into position with paper and cables flying.  We settled as quickly as we could, and before we knew it he was openly weeping and singing through his tears and we were taken aback to the point of forgetting to breathe (though Bonga, Belony, and Belgard remained laser-focused on capturing the moment on film).

We then heard three more songs, each one equally captivating, and as the last one rang out and none of us knew what to expect next, he told Zach and myself quietly (and on camera) that he had come to consider us brothers.  Unsure of how to respond, I asked if he wanted to jam a bit on “Bel Konsey”.  He agreed, and as we began I ventured the harmony vocal I’ve been hearing in my head for the last twenty months and made a conscious effort to look him straight in the eye the entire time.  From that moment on, we got to witness what Christian calls “the real Beken” – confident, animated, expressive, and with a voice that seems to call out from many, many years ago.

There is much more to this conversation and what happened next, though what’s most important to relate here is that it seems we can move on to next steps.

In the afternoon, Zach and I rode with the B3s to their flat so they could collect their things prior to returning to Jakmel, then had Makens drop us off at his apartment before moving along via moto-taksi to a rehearsal of musicians participating in his Lakou Misik project.  These guys were the real deal – amazing voices, intricate and funky musicianship, and a warm rapport with one another.

It’s off to the bus station tomorrow at 6.30am to travel to Jakmel and visit with (hopefully all of) the B3s and Andrew Bigosinski at the Ciné Institute.  I’ll spend tomorrow night in Jakmel before returning to the US on Tuesday.

Misye – Barbancourt!

With Beken in the Kinam flat

Interviews

8.15am
Plans to visit Beken’s childhood surroundings in Kafou have been rescheduled so it’s a more loosely structured day ahead.  I have a cabinet full of instant coffee, a box of Wheaties, and plenty of work to accomplish online, so after checking in shortly with the rooftop scene and letting the sun hit me for a few minutes I’m going to dive into some Coal Train Railroad business before venturing deeper out into the neighborhood this afternoon.

Beken performed brilliantly last night at the Havana Club.  He was approached for photos and handshakes from the moment the six of us spilled out of his boxy Suzuki truck, and while seated at the table in the club he tapped along contentedly with the pounding Haitian hip-hop coming over the PA.  When it was time for him to take the stage, the packed club gave him a standing ovation and sang spiritedly in response to “Fanm Se Kajou”.

* * *
12.05pm
Plans changing rapidly – there’s now an interview breaking out in my apartment and I may jam with a handful of local musicians later this afternoon.

* * *
11.02pm
No jam session materialized but the film crew was able to capture an extended interview with Beken on the terrace above my flat.  I myself was put in front of the camera later (not a place I’m comfortable without an instrument in my hands) and managed to hold steady enough to communicate my initial impressions of Beken and the various possibilities and challenges yet to come.

I was surprised to find myself struggling to answer when Zach asked me a very obvious question – what was it about Beken’s personal story that was compelling enough to launch this nearly two-year quest to meet and make music with him?  Only now as I’m typing this has it occurred to me that at the core of my personal motivations for pushing this project along is the notion of coping with loss.  I’m going to think this over some more and do my best to explain in a future entry.

Meeting Beken

Began the day with rooftop sun salutations and a marginally successful Skype chat with the three East Nashville blondes before walking up the block to meet with Beken, Christian, and Zach at the Kinam Hotel.

Our initial conversation lasted well over three hours.  Beken was guarded at first, but after sharing stories about our families and personal histories he became warm and animated.  We spoke eventually of his pending recording deal in general terms, and as the humidity rose in the courtyard we moved along to a local restaurant for a lunch of broiled fish, rice, and a slaw that packed considerable fire.

After a quick stop at the supermarket for drinking water, cereal, yoghurt, and instant coffee with which to stock the apartment, Christian and myself rejoined the film crew and proceeded to Beken’s home which was located just down the lane.

We camped on Beken’s terrace for a over an hour as he was interviewed by Bonga, the co-producer of the short documentary being planned in conjunction with the Cine Institute.  Over the clamor of the alley below and a howling generator a few doors down, he nonetheless played and sang for us with the same passion, conviction, and intensity as if we were an audience of hundreds.  He is a captivating performer and formidable presence.

Tomorrow we plan to venture out from Petionville and visit Carrefour (Kafou), the neighborhood where Beken grew up, before getting our guitars out in the afternoon and getting into his new songs for the first time.

The Prestige is empty and the mosquitos out in full force.  Mwen fini po jodi a.