The musical celebration of the first abolitionist revolts in Haiti

For those who live in chains, freedom is a malleable concept. The horizon, far from being a flat line, can be drawn in the air from scratch, with the elasticity of free jazz. Hence, the music of freedom is not confined to melodious comforting songs, but can consist of saw-like pianos, discordant notes from wind instruments, such as saxophones, horns, flutes and clarinets, and choruses and cries that emerge from a range of tongues.

This notion of an open horizon is the theme of the recently released album Spiritual Healing: Bwa Kayiman Freedom Suite, by Montreal native Jowee Omicil, 46.

A virtuoso Canadian saxophonist and member of the Haitian diaspora, Omicil uses free jazz to recount how his ancestors fought for freedom to break the chains of slavery that had trapped them on the shores of West Africa, thereby laying the foundations of a new state.

In the case of Haiti, the slaves who escaped and hid in the mountains were known as the Maroons, scattering in the hidden corners of that region of America. It was they who laid the foundations of an island nation that managed to shake off its colonial past, using the language of Creole — a mix of French and African languages such as Wolof, Fon, Ewé, Kilongo, Yoruba and Igbo, with expressions from Taino languages (the Arawak) and other Native American tongues thrown in for good measure.

In fact, Haiti, which in Arawak means land of mountains, was the first Latin American country to proclaim independence, which it did in January 1804, following an abolitionist revolution initiated by Afro-descendants a decade earlier. It is precisely about these first revolts, known as Bois Bwa Caïman, that Omicil speaks of in his sixth album, which is a tribute to the essence of freedom.

That slave rebellion of August 14, 1791, in the Cayman Forest in what was then the French colony of Saint Domingue on the island of Hispaniola has become a healing ceremony for which Omicil summons the souls of the living and the dead to celebrate the courage and bravery it required. “Because you have to tell your children how freedom was achieved,” he says.

Known lately for his role in The Eddy, the series produced by La La Land’s Damien Chazelle for Netflix and, in the jazz world, as Mr. BasH, Omicil explains that the making of this album in the summer of 2020 while confined to his home in Paris involved suffering and reciting certain texts while in a trance as he tried to capture the initiation rites of his ancestors and embrace the spectrum of West Indian diversity.

Drawing from the styles he learned at the prestigious American music college, Berklee, but also from street and contemporary sounds, Omicil, who has played with Branford Marsalis, Richard Bona, Marcus Miller, Wyclef Jean and Roy Hargrove, is convinced that truth is liberating. And his way of approaching that truth is through improvisation using his body, thereby accessing the doors opened by ancestral ritual. The result is an hour of music in 21 segments that are naturally integrated into what could be interpreted as a story of those revolts, complete with the first calls to clandestine meetings, the debate that ensued, the threats, the commitment to action and the dynamics of the struggle that accelerates with each step towards a new horizon.

Like many of the descendants of those enslaved who crossed the Atlantic against their will, Omicil knows that his ancestors arrived on the new continent accompanied by gods venerated in ancient African kingdoms, such as the kingdom of Dahomey — present-day Benin. From the voodoo and Yoruba rituals came spirits or Iwas who, in Haiti, are called Papa Legba or Eshu in Brazil, and who guard the borders between the present-day and a timeless universe, and allow exchanges between the visible and supernatural worlds.

That Afro-Atlantic 18th century universe was governed by Bantu-Kongo principles and, therefore, populated by people who fraternized from different shores and dimensions thanks to messengers providing communication between gods and men. For these messengers, time and space was no obstacle, and so it also ceased to be impassable for slaves. For example, one legend describes how Eshu killed a bird with a stone he threw yesterday. The poetry embedded in spirituality gave the slaves the courage to achieve radical change and is the source of inspiration from which Omicil seeks to nurture himself, several generations after his great-great-grandparents landed in the Caribbean. Helping him create the magic is Randy Kerber and Jonathan Jurion on piano, percussionists Arnaud Dolmen & Yoann Danier and Jendah Manga on bass.

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