April 12 street date. On her new album "Sun Without the Heat", Leyla McCalla brings more playfulness and joy than she has on previous records when she speaks to the concerns that have shaped her career, mainly including an ethos in which you must look back at lost and erased histories before you can embrace a forward vision of Afrofuturism and the importance of music making to heal and forge relationships across differences. Across its ten tracks, she achieves this with music that combines jazz, Haitian Twoubadou, American blues, folk, and Brazilian Tropicalismo. Born in New York City to Haitian emigrants and activists, McCalla possesses a stunning mastery of the cello, tenor banjo, and guitar. A founding member of Our Native Daughters alongside Rhiannon Giddens, Amysthyst Kiah, and Allison Russell and an alumna of Grammy award-winning band The Carolina Chocolate Drops, McCalla has also received considerable praise and attention for her solo works, including 2014's "Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes", which prompted the New York Times to rave that "her voice is disarmingly natural, and her settings are elegantly succinct" and 2022's "Breaking The Thermometer" (4/5 review from The Guardian).
April 12 street date. On her new album "Sun Without the Heat", Leyla McCalla brings more playfulness and joy than she has on previous records when she speaks to the concerns that have shaped her career, mainly including an ethos in which you must look back at lost and erased histories before you can embrace a forward vision of Afrofuturism and the importance of music making to heal and forge relationships across differences. Across its ten tracks, she achieves this with music that combines jazz, Haitian Twoubadou, American blues, folk, and Brazilian Tropicalismo. Born in New York City to Haitian emigrants and activists, McCalla possesses a stunning mastery of the cello, tenor banjo, and guitar. A founding member of Our Native Daughters alongside Rhiannon Giddens, Amysthyst Kiah, and Allison Russell and an alumna of Grammy award-winning band The Carolina Chocolate Drops, McCalla has also received considerable praise and attention for her solo works, including 2014's "Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes", which prompted the New York Times to rave that "her voice is disarmingly natural, and her settings are elegantly succinct" and 2022's "Breaking The Thermometer" (4/5 review from The Guardian).
May 6 street date (CD)/June 24 street date (LP). Leyla McCalla finds inspiration from her past and present. Whether it is her Haitian heritage or her adopted home of New Orleans, she - a bilingual multi-instrumentalist and alumna of Grammy award-winning African-American string band, the Carolina Chocolate Drops - has risen to produce a distinctive sound that reflects the union of her roots and experience. McCalla has produced a multi-disciplinary music, dance and theatre work, "Breaking the Thermometer to Hide the Fever", which follows her personal journey as she uncovers the history of Radio Haiti, the first radio station in Haiti to report news in Haitian Kreyol - the voice of the people. Through this juxtaposition of voices - the personal and political, the anecdotal and the journalistic - McCalla gives expression to the enduring spirit of Haiti's marginalized poor in the face of several centuries of political oppression. Performances of the theatre work are currently scheduled in New Orleans and Philadelphia with more to be announced in soon. This album is a soundtrack of sorts to the theatre piece, featuring the songs that Leyla McCalla wrote and performs in this work.
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