“Dude, that rhythm section is pretty great!” I overheard as the Haitian band RAM fired through its first rounds of mizik rasin, a brew of vodou and good old rock ‘n’ roll.
I realized, looking around at the State House stage Wednesday night, that RAM’s “rhythm section” consisted of no less than eight of the 10 people in the band.
“So does he not dig the singers?” I wondered, unbelieving, eyes circling back to mid-stage, where long-married couple and co-vocalists Lunise and Richard A. Morse (initials RAM) were dancing, singing and inciting — as they have for the past 30 years.
Richard Morse, who returned to his ancestral Haiti decades ago, knowing no creole, in search of his roots, cut a bit of an unexpected figure against the thunderous Haitian drums and pummeling African-inspired rhythms. Imagine a Jeffrey Tambor character who has gone a little gonzo and bought a hotel in Haiti that looks straight out of a Joseph Conrad novel. But instead of his story going all vines-dripping-from-the-lattice, humid and ghastly, he instead started to lead and compose for the house band at the hotel’s adjoining club. He and Lunise brought booming local rhythms and fuzzed out guitars to the most diverse audiences in Port-au-Prince.
Wednesday found Morse returning to his childhood home. Well, technically he grew up in Woodbridge, but his mother owned a dance studio just blocks down State Street from where Morse stood honoring the music of his maternal roots, backed by — and the guy next to me could not stress this enough — “a great rhythm section.”
Opening the show for RAM was the adventurous musical patchwork of the New Haven-based band Dr. Caterwaul’s Cadre of Clairvoyant Claptraps, an assembly of free associated mostly-multi-instrumentalists containing accordion, fiddle, horns, saxophone, upright bass, a tiny plastic keyboard and a drummer whose galloping jazz licks belied a look suggesting he might bust into a d‑beat at any moment. Frankly if any band could get away with a move like that, it might be Dr. Caterwaul’s. Theirs was largely a pan-jazz-based sound, with just enough Loozianna drawl to tie its vaguely creole horse to RAM’s hitching post. Dr. Caterwaul’s is unafraid of exploring the left field, from the liltingly atonal to a flanged-out double bass. The band left the audience dazed and punch drunk enough for RAM to come out and knock em dead. (Full disclosure: the editor of the arts section of this publication is a member of Dr. Caterwaul’s and I have been informed that, for conflict-of-interest reasons, I have nothing positive to say about him.)
So back to RAM’s rhythm section: that eight-headed creature, whose syncopated beats sculpted a soundscape somewhere between a herd of funky brontosauri on a deforestation run and amphetamine-fueled war games. Bass lines thumped around like bowling balls on a trampoline. Fuzzy guitar runs slinked and slithered through the rhythm’s underbrush. Somehow, amid this chaos, members of the rhythm section managed to juggle bright yellow, meter-long rara horns while others formed vocal halos around the chants and invocations beaming from the front couple.
To watch the delicate balance between Lunise’s graceful swirling and writhing, arms reaching high into the dense tropical fog of the music, and Richard’s unselfconscious dad-boogie made the stage feel freer. There was no pretense. The crowd was a diverse mélange of locals with its fair share of creole-speaking ex-pats, and the whole experience felt imbued with a come-as-you-are egalitarianism, an attitude reflected in RAM’s people-have-the-power lyrics.
All in all this show was another impressive win for the State House, and with that I will leave you, dear reader, with a sincere recommendation. If you have any interest in international music, pull up the State House’s website and mark the date of every act you see that is not from this country. Save your pennies and attend. Their international concerts are so consistently superlative that I would be remiss not to encourage those interested to actually put their shoes on and show up.
