ALBUM REVIEW: Nathalie Joachim’s ‘Fanm d’Ayiti’

by Peter Tracy

Singer, flutist, and composer Nathalie Joachim. Photo by Josué Azor.

While cooking, walking, tending the garden, or washing clothes, the women of Haiti sing songs. For Nathalie Joachim, a Haitian-American singer, flutist, and composer, her image of Haiti is one of love, beauty, tradition, family, and, perhaps above all, music: it pervades the house after church on Sundays and communicates the stories and traditions of past generations.

On her new album Fanm d’Ayiti, Joachim taps into Haiti’s long musical history through original songs and arrangements of classics by some of Haiti’s legendary women musicians. The resulting compositions engage her Haitian heritage and continue these women’s messages of resilience, love, and hope.

On Fanm d’Ayiti, which is Haitian Creole for “Women of Haiti,” traditional songs are treated in a radically new way, with original arrangements featuring voice, flute, and electronics by Joachim and strings performed by the Chicago-based Spektral Quartet. Woven into the mix are recordings of a Haitian girls’ choir from Joachim’s family home, interviews with some of Haiti’s best-known female voices, and the voice of Joachim’s own grandmother. These elements come together to form something that feels both old and new—a musical language of tuneful songs, folk-style strings, stuttering electronics, and vibrant energy.

The album is set into motion with an arrangement of the song “Papa Loko,” which features fluttering string harmonics, skipping electronic percussion, and a bouncy arpeggiated bassline. This song segues into a recording of the Haitian singer Emerante de Pradines, who speaks about her feeling of unity with all female Haitian artists and leads us into the three-part “Suite pou Dantan,” a heartfelt dedication to the farming village that Joachim’s family calls home. Here, Joachim sings along with the girls’ choir over chaotically exuberant percussion, pairs field recording samples with steady drum tracks, and weaves winding flute melodies through the strings of the Spektral Quartet.

An arrangement of “Lamizè pa dous,” a song of African origin translating to “Poverty is Not Sweet,” gives way to the interlude “Couldn’t Tell Her What To Do,” in which we hear the moving story of the Haitian singer and justice-seeker Toto Bissainthe, as told by her daughter Milena Sandler over swelling string harmonies.

Side B of the album begins with an elegy-like arrangement of the traditional Haitian song “Manman m voye m peze kafe,” which feels almost like a theme and variations or a passacaglia with its continuous bassline, circling strings, and arpeggiating, marimba-like electronics. Two further arrangements of traditional songs follow: the grooving yet plaintive “Legba na konsole” and “Madan Bellegarde,” which features a contrapuntal duet between Joachim and the viola, a contemplative chorale of strings and flute, the voice of Joachim’s grandmother, and scattered blips of electric harmony.

Photo by Josué Azor.

This leads us finally into the interlude “The Ones I Listened To,” in which the voices of Haitian musicians Carole Demesmin, Emerante de Pradines, and Milena Sandler encourage both Nathalie and the listener to pursue their dreams despite hardships, and the title track “Fanm d’Ayiti,” a festive original song celebrating Haiti and its strong women, ending the album on a hopeful note.

It is important to remember that for Joachim and the people of Haiti, many of these songs are an integral part of their culture, traditions, and everyday lives. Joachim has said that songs like “Lamizè pa dous” are not only songs to sing while working, but were used by slaves to communicate with each other in ways that their oppressors couldn’t understand, much like the Negro spirituals of the United States.

In a certain sense, these songs continue to serve that purpose. Many of the Haitian Creole songs on this album were sung by women during the worst periods of intellectual repression and dictatorship in Haiti’s history as a way of maintaining their language and traditions—and it is these subtle acts of subversion that Joachim celebrates in her arrangements. On Fanm d’Ayiti, Nathalie Joachim continues the lineage of Haitian women who bring together communities, pass on their culture, and fight for justice through their music.


Nathalie Joachim’s Fanm d’Ayiti is out August 30 on New Amsterdam Records. For more information, click here.

2017 New Music Grammy Nominees

Extra! Extra! The 2017 Grammy nominees have been announced and we’re here to celebrate the discs that have been featured as our Album of the Week or in regular rotation on our 24/7 stream. Congratulations to all of the nominees!

2016 Second Inversion Albums of the Week

Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance

Steve Reich — Third Coast Percussion (Cedille)
Second Inversion Album of the Week February 15-19

51moxudgtlIn their new album, the quartet surveys the composer’s works for percussion over a four-decade span, beginning with the most recent: his three-movement Mallet Quartet. Composed in 2009, the work is scored for two vibraphones and two five-octave marimbas. Third Coast Percussion twirls effortlessly through the circling motives and interlocking canons of the two outer movements, transitioning seamlessly both in and out of the central slow movement. A stark musical contrast between the thinly textured, almost transparent middle movement against the persistent pulse of the outer two brings color and narrative to the piece. – Maggie Molloy

Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance

Serious Business — Spektral Quartet (Sono Luminus)
Second Inversion Album of the Week February 8-12

dsl-92198-coverSpektral’s new album, titled “Serious Business,” is anything but serious. The album comprises four different perspectives on humor through the lens of classical music, featuring three new works by living composers and one classic from that late, great father of the string quartet, Joseph Haydn.

But don’t let the lighthearted humor fool you—these guys are no classical music newbies. Comprised of violinists Clara Lyon and Austin Wulliman, violist Doyle Armbrust, and cellist Russell Rolen, the Spektral Quartet performs music from across the classical music spectrum. The group is committed to creating connections across the centuries and providing a discourse between the traditional classical canon and the, well, not-so-traditional contemporary classical canon. – Maggie Molloy

Best Music Film

The Music Of Strangers — Yo-Yo Ma & The Silk Road Ensemble (Sony)
Second Inversion Album of the Week July 25-29 (companion album to the film)

Sing Me HomeWe need music now more than ever—not as a distraction or an escape, but as a gateway toward experiencing our shared humanity. We need music to open our hearts, our ears, and our minds. We need music to connect us in ways which transcend language, religion, tradition, and geography.

That’s the idea behind Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, a global music collective comprised of performers and composers from over 20 countries throughout Asia, Europe, and North America. – Maggie Molloy

Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album

Real Enemies — Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society (New Amsterdam)
Second Inversion’s Album of the Week October 10-14

a2976727568_16Whether you’re a conspiracy theory junkie or a sideline skeptic, even the most patriotic of us loves a good old-fashioned conspiracy. Whether it’s the Watergate scandal or the inner-workings of the Illuminati, alien sightings or the mysterious murder of JonBenét Ramsey, we just can’t help but turn up our ears when we hear a juicy top-secret scheme.

And since we’re already listening, Brooklyn-based composer and bandleader Darcy James Argue decided to take our eavesdropping ears to the next level: his new album Real Enemies is a 13-chapter exploration into America’s unshakable fascination with conspiracy theories. Performed with his 18-piece big band Secret Society and released on New Amsterdam Records, the album traverses the full range of postwar paranoia, from the Red Scare to the surveillance state, mind control to fake moon landings, COINTELPRO to the CIA-contra cocaine trafficking ring—and everything in between. – Maggie Molloy


2016 albums in rotation on Second Inversion’s 24/7 stream

Best Surround Sound Album & Best Engineered Album, Classical

Dutilleux: Sur La Mêe Accord; Les Citations; Mystère De L’Instant & Timbres, Espace, Mouvement — Alexander Lipay & Dmitriy Lipay, engineers (Ludovic Morlot & Seattle Symphony) (Seattle Symphony Media)

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Best Contemporary Classical Composition

Winger: Conversations With Nijinsky — C. F. Kip Winger, composer (Martin West & San Francisco Ballet Orchestra) (VBI Classic Recordings)

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ALBUM REVIEW: Spektral Quartet’s “Serious Business”

by Maggie Molloy

Spektral Quartet

Photo Credit: Drew Reynolds

In Medieval times musicians were essentially court jesters—entertainers who performed music, told jokes, and did tricks to entertain the nobility or to make money at fairs and markets. But somewhere along the long and winding road of the Western music tradition, music became much more serious.

Fast forward to the 21st century, where opera houses and concert halls protect and preserve a canon of “serious” classical works. Audience members dress in suits and gowns, sit quietly in their seats, read expertly-crafted program notes, stick their noses in the air and, most importantly, never clap between movements.

Or at least, that’s how it feels sometimes. But the Spektral Quartet is here to dispel that classical concert-going stereotype and inject a little much-needed comic relief into the classical music realm.

Spektral’s new album, titled “Serious Business,” is anything but serious. The album comprises four different perspectives on humor through the lens of classical music, featuring three new works by living composers and one classic from that late, great father of the string quartet, Joseph Haydn.

DSL-92198 Cover

But don’t let the lighthearted humor fool you—these guys are no classical music newbies. Comprised of violinists Clara Lyon and Austin Wulliman, violist Doyle Armbrust, and cellist Russell Rolen, the Spektral Quartet performs music from across the classical music spectrum. The group is committed to creating connections across the centuries and providing a discourse between the traditional classical canon and the, well, not-so-traditional contemporary classical canon.

THIS ALBUM IS NOT FUNNY,” reads the first page of the album’s liner notes, in bold black and all caps. True, the music is not ha-ha funny per se—it’s not going to get you on the floor laughing, crying, or rolling around gut-busted and teary-eyed. But the music is, however, full of humor, tricks, subtle charm, and clever wit.

The first piece of “Serious Business,” composed by Sky Macklay, is not-so-subtly titled “Many, Many Cadences.” Suffice it to say, the piece has a lot, A LOT of cadences. Each instrument pings rapid-fire back and forth between the stratosphere and the lowest note in its pitch range, creating a twitchy, glitchy sound mass of tonal cadences clangoring up, down, sideways, and across like a pinball machine.

“Heaping nothing but cadences on top of one another is a little like an America’s Funniest Home Videos highlight reel of dads getting head-butted by waist-high toddlers,” violist Doyle Armbrust writes in the liner notes, “Which is to say, it’s all payoff.”

But that payoff doesn’t come easy—it takes a seriously talented group of string players to perform a tangled nine-minute mess of interwoven and overlapping melodic fragments, brain-frying base-jumps, and constant cadences.

Five short movements and some existential poetry comprise the next piece on the album, David Reminick’s “The Ancestral Mousetrap.” An absurdist macabre text by poet Russell Edson serves as the libretto for this musical phantasmagoria—and the string players themselves are the singers.

“The five-movement timbral kaleidoscope opens with a preposterous slide and ends with a scurry up the fingerboard,” Armbrust writes, “But for what happens in between, you are on your own.”

Yes, in between you are on your own in a thrilling and nightmarish hallucination of operatic horror, deranged pitch collections, melodic dissonance, asymmetrical meter, and the occasional four-part vocal harmony. In fact, it’s so unapologetically macabre that it borders on pulp—and therein lies the humor. But in all seriousness, the sheer skill it takes to perform a kaleidoscopic string quartet while also singing four-part harmonies is pretty incredible—and it’s on full display in this macabre musical mashup.

Spektral reels it back in with a performance of Haydn’s String Quartet Op. 33 No. 2, “The Joke.” From toying with key signatures to tongue-in-cheek codas and trap-door endings, this classic crowd favorite is filled with musical subversions to charm and amuse audiences—and Spektral doesn’t miss a beat. It’s a lighthearted homage to one of the greats, a charismatic and jovial joke reminding us classical music buffs never to take ourselves too seriously.

The album ends with a performance of Chris Fisher-Lochhead’s “Hack,” a sprawling 22-part piece composed on the transcribed vocal deliveries of standup comics. The source materials for each part vary in length from four seconds to three minutes, and the comics featured encompass a wide range of comedic styles and historical periods.

(Second Inversion was thrilled to present the video premiere of this gem a few weeks ago)

“Some are truculent, some are reflective,” Fisher-Lochhead said of the comedians. “Some use the stage as an arena for withering social critique, some for personal confession, some for ritualized transgression.  Each section treats a single comedic bit by a single comedian; the source material is not always clearly foregrounded—it is often submerged, dissected, amplified, deconstructed, or otherwise transformed.”

The piece features impeccably nuanced string quartet transcriptions of 16 comedians ranging from Robin Williams to Sarah Silverman, Robert Pryor to Kumail Nanjiani, Dick Gregory to Sam Kinison. But here’s the funny thing: the piece removes the words from the formula of the joke, leaving us with just the humor of the comedic cadences.

It is sonic anarchy. “Hack” is an obstacle course of screeches, swoops, and sputters, breakneck tempos and unison outbursts, gauzy glissandi and meter changes. But for being a piece about comedy, it’s actually quite serious in scope and subject matter: it is an exploration into the music of American speech and the way that language, laughter, and music connects us all.

Because in the end, that’s what the entire album is about: finding the humor and charm in classical music, making a joke, sharing a smile, and maybe, just maybe, accidentally clapping between movements.

VIDEO PREMIERE: Spektral Quartet’s “Hack” by Chris Fisher-Lochhead

by Maggie Stapleton

Spektral Quartet

Spektral Quartet – photo credit: Drew Reynolds

We are thrilled to present the video premiere of Hack by Chris Fisher-Lochhead! This is an amuse-bouche (literally) for Spektral Quartet’s upcoming album, Serious Businessfeaturing three world premieres (and one not-world-premiere by Haydn), all thematically centered around humor in classical music.

Hack (2015) takes painstaking transcriptions of bits from famous stand-up comedians (including Sarah Silverman, Dave Chappelle, George Carlin, Robin Williams, Rodney Dangerfield, Kumail Nanjiani, Richard Pryor, and many more) as the piece’s launch point, and mines the nonverbal elements of humor: cadence, pitch, and timing. The staggering score is by turns rapturous, heady, and hyperkinetic.

Serious Business is released on January 29 on Sono Luminus. Stay tuned for Second Inversion’s album review!

DSL-92198 Cover