New York Time Review
THE
ARTS/CULTURAL DESK POP
REVIEW; A Gentle Evening With a Sunny Haitian Big Band
By JON PARELES
The most genial music in the Caribbean may well be Haitian kon'pa, big-band
dance music with an easygoing midtempo lilt and an endless supply of sunny rifts.
The music has survived on Haiti since the swing era, even as kon'pa has turned
into compas and been rearranged for guitar bands. On Friday night, the Midsummer
Night Swing series at Lincoln Center presented Orchestre Septentrional, a 20-member
big band from Cap-Haitien that marks its 50th anniversary on July 27. One of the
group's original nine members, Ulrick Pierre Louis, leads the band, surrounded
by younger musicians and swaying to the beat with his fellow saxophone players.
The
band has not stayed unchanged through the decades. Along with saxophones and trumpets,
a pair of electric keyboards is now a big part of its sound, tooting like a carousel
organ or mimicking chimes, steel drum, vibraphone or Andean pipes. But at Lincoln
Center, the songs still unfolded with old-fashioned suavity. The
band's vocalists are gentle tenors with a sustained, affable style akin to old
Cuban soneros and to African soukous singers. They sang in Creole about yearning
for love, or lightly admonished listeners to behave well: to provide for their
families, take care of the next generation and drop pretensions. The two sets
also included ''Temoinage'' (''Testimonial''), a No. 1 hit in Haiti last year,
in which a Septentrional fan insists that any bad news can wait until the dance
is over. As
singers traded call-and-response, the band opened its cornucopia of riffs: arpeggios
from the keyboards and electric guitar, then puffed chords and circular phrases
from the saxophones and, eventually, stuttering and leaping punctuations from
the trumpets. The keyboardists occasionally took solos, but the horn players didn't;
the songs were skeins of riffs, traded and overlapped, each catchier than the
last. The music wasn't slick; horns were out of tune in a down-home way. But as
the couples glided on the dance floor and the songs purred along, Orchestre Septentrional
seemed likely to keep listeners smiling for another 50 years. Published:
07 - 06 - 1998, Late Edition - Final, Section E, Column 1, Page 5
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