Leyla McCalla

"'When I chose to play it in fourth grade, I didn't know what a cello was. I thought it was a woodwind instrument. I walked up to this table in the classroom with all these different instruments on it and picked up the piccolo. But from across the room, the teacher called out: 'Leyla McCalla! Leyla McCalla!' I turned around and she had a cello in her hands. It was almost as big as me, really cumbersome and not at all what I was expecting."

Leyla McCalla has been finding out what a cello is – and what it can do – ever since. Having initially restricted herself to the classical music world, her artistic brief now takes in the folk songs of her parents' native Haiti as well as the old-time music of the American south. A touring member of the African-American string band Carolina Chocolate Drops, with whom she is almost permanently on the road, McCalla has found time and space to record an album of her own – the exquisite Vari-Colored Songs.

Today is something of a rest day, a stopover in Greensboro, North Carolina, en route to her adopted home in New Orleans. Not that it is much of a rest day, though. She is surrounded by musical instruments in the living room of Rhiannon Giddens, her Carolina Chocolate Drops bandmate. A break in rehearsals – while Giddens takes her seven-month-old son for a stroll around the neighbourhood – allows McCalla to explain why she diverted from the cellist's usual passage towards conservatoire and orchestra.

"My family moved to Ghana for two years when I was in high school and I quit playing," she says. "There was no one to study with there and it put my conservatory hopes on hold. After we moved back to the States, I met a cellist called Rufus Cappadocia. His playing blew my mind – really rhythmic and exciting. It made me want to explore this instrument, to figure out what it can do besides all the things I love about it."

McCalla not only reassessed how she played the cello – experimenting with finger-picking, strumming it like a mandolin – but also stepped outside the classical canon to embrace old-time tunes and Haitian folk songs, traditions previously untouched by the cello. "I get more out of music creating things that people have never heard before," she says. "And that continues to propel me."

Three summers ago, McCalla took the decision to up sticks from New York and settle in New Orleans. "I thought that moving there would bring out some creative things that I couldn't explore in New York, where so much of my life was spent trying to figure out how to pay the rent. I moved on a wing and a prayer, but suddenly I was totally in charge of my own life."

She soon became a fixture on the streets of New Orleans, strapping her faithful cello on her back and riding her drop-handlebar bike to a regular spot in the French Quarter, outside the police station. There she would treat passersby to Bach's Cello Suites. "The police, and everyone else, seemed to like me because the music was classy for New Orleans. Usually, it's bands playing Dixieland jazz or a guy stomping his foot and playing plugged-in bluesy guitar. But they were like: 'Oooh, classical music. Wow!' I'd sit there for five hours a day, sometimes more. I met people that way. I started playing with local bands, sitting in with a few people, starting to play more jazz, starting to write more songs."

As well as freeing her up creatively, McCalla's relocation put her closer – geographically and culturally – to her Haitian heritage. "I didn't realise there was such a connection between Haiti and New Orleans," she says, citing their shared Spanish colonial past (originally French, it was part of the Spanish empire during the late 18th century). "But if you go to cemeteries in New Orleans, you see my family name on a lot of the tombs. Haiti is such a part of Louisianan history."

Using songs to dust off this hidden history, McCalla's art was chiming with that of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who had tracked her down to that pitch outside the police station. "I appreciated the clarity of what they were doing – telling the untold story of the black string band tradition and living that music, sharing its history with people."

These graceful, defiant Haitian folk songs, sung in Creole in McCalla's bell-clear voice, elegantly illuminate Vari-Colored Songs. The record's title comes from its opening track, a poem by the African-American literary titan Langston Hughes, set to music and retitled Heart of Gold. It's one of several Hughes poems to take song form on the album. "Music was such a big part of what inspired him to write in the first place," explains McCalla. "His poems just feel so musical. I began recording little snippets that became songs. It could have become a huge project. I could have been doing this for the re - The Guardian

"'When I chose to play it in fourth grade, I didn't know what a cello was. I thought it was a woodwind instrument. I walked up to this table in the classroom with all these different instruments on it and picked up the piccolo. But from across the room, the teacher called out: 'Leyla McCalla! Leyla McCalla!' I turned around and she had a cello in her hands. It was almost as big as me, really cumbersome and not at all what I was expecting."

Leyla McCalla has been finding out what a cello is – and what it can do – ever since. Having initially restricted herself to the classical music world, her artistic brief now takes in the folk songs of her parents' native Haiti as well as the old-time music of the American south. A touring member of the African-American string band Carolina Chocolate Drops, with whom she is almost permanently on the road, McCalla has found time and space to record an album of her own – the exquisite Vari-Colored Songs.

Today is something of a rest day, a stopover in Greensboro, North Carolina, en route to her adopted home in New Orleans. Not that it is much of a rest day, though. She is surrounded by musical instruments in the living room of Rhiannon Giddens, her Carolina Chocolate Drops bandmate. A break in rehearsals – while Giddens takes her seven-month-old son for a stroll around the neighbourhood – allows McCalla to explain why she diverted from the cellist's usual passage towards conservatoire and orchestra.

"My family moved to Ghana for two years when I was in high school and I quit playing," she says. "There was no one to study with there and it put my conservatory hopes on hold. After we moved back to the States, I met a cellist called Rufus Cappadocia. His playing blew my mind – really rhythmic and exciting. It made me want to explore this instrument, to figure out what it can do besides all the things I love about it."

McCalla not only reassessed how she played the cello – experimenting with finger-picking, strumming it like a mandolin – but also stepped outside the classical canon to embrace old-time tunes and Haitian folk songs, traditions previously untouched by the cello. "I get more out of music creating things that people have never heard before," she says. "And that continues to propel me."

Three summers ago, McCalla took the decision to up sticks from New York and settle in New Orleans. "I thought that moving there would bring out some creative things that I couldn't explore in New York, where so much of my life was spent trying to figure out how to pay the rent. I moved on a wing and a prayer, but suddenly I was totally in charge of my own life."

She soon became a fixture on the streets of New Orleans, strapping her faithful cello on her back and riding her drop-handlebar bike to a regular spot in the French Quarter, outside the police station. There she would treat passersby to Bach's Cello Suites. "The police, and everyone else, seemed to like me because the music was classy for New Orleans. Usually, it's bands playing Dixieland jazz or a guy stomping his foot and playing plugged-in bluesy guitar. But they were like: 'Oooh, classical music. Wow!' I'd sit there for five hours a day, sometimes more. I met people that way. I started playing with local bands, sitting in with a few people, starting to play more jazz, starting to write more songs."

As well as freeing her up creatively, McCalla's relocation put her closer – geographically and culturally – to her Haitian heritage. "I didn't realise there was such a connection between Haiti and New Orleans," she says, citing their shared Spanish colonial past (originally French, it was part of the Spanish empire during the late 18th century). "But if you go to cemeteries in New Orleans, you see my family name on a lot of the tombs. Haiti is such a part of Louisianan history."

Using songs to dust off this hidden history, McCalla's art was chiming with that of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who had tracked her down to that pitch outside the police station. "I appreciated the clarity of what they were doing – telling the untold story of the black string band tradition and living that music, sharing its history with people."

These graceful, defiant Haitian folk songs, sung in Creole in McCalla's bell-clear voice, elegantly illuminate Vari-Colored Songs. The record's title comes from its opening track, a poem by the African-American literary titan Langston Hughes, set to music and retitled Heart of Gold. It's one of several Hughes poems to take song form on the album. "Music was such a big part of what inspired him to write in the first place," explains McCalla. "His poems just feel so musical. I began recording little snippets that became songs. It could have become a huge project. I could have been doing this for the re - The Guardian

Two of Carolina's sweetest chocolate drops started their tour of the UK and France at Cecil Sharp House last Wednesday (03/10/2013). An array of prone musical instruments lay basking in the light of Leyla McCalla and Rhiannon Giddens as they took to the stage. By the end of the performance we too bathed in their talent, beauty and charm, it is the kind that washes over you, letting the spirit soar for those brief hours of listening.

It was my first visit to Cecil Sharp House since my tenure as Twickfolk's artist-in-residence earlier this year. Every week I was welcomed into the bosom of Twickenham's folk scene and got to know many of the regulars there. Due to their loyalty and dedication the faces rarely changed, so foolishly I thought I would recognise a few on this night. Not only was every face in the warm wood-panelled hall a new one but no singular demographic materialised with which to pigeon-hole them with my artistic eye.


Luckily there was a couple of faces that I recognised, a gig wouldn't be worth going to unless the legendary Dr and Mrs Fizzy were in attendance. Mike Watts was fizzing with his camera, taking pictures (only for the first 3 songs) for the EFDSS or English folk dance and song society. I was lucky enough to sketch the whole way through, but it wasn't an easy brief. No sooner had Leyla McCalla picked up her cello than she had replaced it with banjo. Rhiannon Giddens was equally culpable, swapping violin for banjo, then triangle, and as if to tease us she blew her Kazoo at one point.

It was a whirl of lyrical songs and beautiful craftsmanship, carefully carved from their own traditions and with a sweep of their musical chisels in our direction too. The two major pillars of the evening that held the impressive Cecil Sharp ceiling so high were Giddens' US Civil War inspirations and McCalla's tasty Haitian brews.


Both the stars of Rhiannon Giddens and Leyla McCalla's are in the ascendancy but it was the later that shone particularly bright. Her most recent release 'Vari-Colored Songs' has received some Very-Favorable reviews already. Her performance on 'Rose-Marie' was a standout and the flavour of her Haitian songs created extra layers to an evening that was already eclectic. As if to exaggerated the flight of McCalla's words on 'Meci Bon Dieu' the flock of tattooed birds seemed to spring from her slender frame into the excited hall. She often created the thermals for Giddens to soar too with her own voice of purity and clarity.

As always I roped in the nearest expert to hide my woeful knowledge and met a charming fan in the form of Neil Coffey. His favourite of the night was Rhiannon Giddens' 'Cuckoo' song and there was an appreciation of the change in material and pace from their work in the foursome Carolina Chocolate Drops. Neil even admitted that he saw them twice during a recent visit to the Cambridge Folk Festival. Its easy to see why, with such depth and pure musical talent you would have to have a second nibble on these chocolate bonbons. - The Art Of Jazz

A sometime member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Leyla McCalla brings an array of influences to her unusual debut. Principally it's a tribute to Langston Hughes, feted poet of the 1920s Harlem renaissance, with Hughes's laconic verse set to simple arrangements of banjo and guitar, though the classically trained McCalla also weaves in cello, most often as a plucked, rhythmic pulse. Raised in New York by Haitian parents, she now lives in New Orleans, and five antique Creole songs, in that baffling French hybrid, provide a rootsy counterpoint to Hughes's elegant rhymes. McCalla's light, unfussy vocals complete a charming, resonant spell. - The Guardian