A User's Guide to Alan Lomax
The late Alan Lomax commands a nearly unparalleled reverence in American academia primarily as the folklorist who preserved Appalachian folk music by way of his field recorder. But Lomax also traveled the world doing the same, even so charged for a time by the Library of Congress. The gargantuan collection Alan Lomax in Haiti pares down the 1500-plus recordings he made while in Haiti in late 1936 and early 1937. Somewhat, at least.
Not surprisingly, it's the "Troubadour Music" portion that stands out as the most thoroughly enjoyable; paying your bills with music will soundly whip your songs into shape, it seems. "Ago's Bal Band," in particular, may have the most professional material here, proper forms and sensibly clean backing arrangements where elsewhere you might instead expect chanting street mobs. But the volume about children is also unexpectedly appealing, school classrooms and scout troops singing songs about crocodiles that probably correspond roughly to Shel Silverstein, or for the most cohesive album-like subset, you might try focusing on the Francilia sessions, named after the mysterious voodoo singer Lomax recorded repeatedly in bite-sized a cappella chunks toward the end of his trip. Bookworms will likewise no doubt enjoy finding author Zora Neale Hurston singing on several tracks.
But no matter what the means of approach — and you'll definitely need to find one — this remains a staggeringly intimidating collection to digest. There's the sprawl, of course — 10 volumes, 280 songs, more than eight hours of material. But then there's also the language barrier (perhaps exempting listeners fluent in both French and Haitian creole), not to mention that the recordings are also absolutely otherworldly, frozen reflections of long-gone likenesses, some so short that they themselves scarcely seem to exist at all before vaporizing, leaving only scratchy and low-resolution footprints per the technology available at the time.
Most importantly, though, all along it's impossible to forget that this material is not so much art as it is history, a pedestal to which the vast majority of music from the decades that have since passed has unsuccessfully aspired. There are tight parallels to be drawn here to Hurricane Katrina's impact on jazz history given that the release of this collection coincidentally came barely a month before Haiti was flattened by its most destructive earthquake in centuries. It may be hard to imagine amid our current multimedia gluttony, but decades ago it was by definition only the most treasured relics that could make it as far as a Lomax document. Don't ignore this. We at least owe them that much.
