Overview:
Rasin Okan, Brooklyn’s solely rasin sèch band, launched its first album, Jou Ma Lonje, on July 19. Cultural employee and well being activist Véronëque Ignace discusses the group’s work and its deep connection to Haitian cultural identification.
Greater than twenty years after its founding in Brooklyn, Rasin Sèch band Rasin Okan, launched its first album on July 19, “Jou Ma Lonje,” a daring reaffirmation of Haiti’s cultural and religious legacy. Pushed by conventional Vodou rhythms and lyrical requires justice, the album displays the group’s long-standing mission to protect and reframe Haitian roots music within the diaspora.
For band member and cultural well being activist Véronëque Ignace, the venture additionally marks a deep alignment between sound and objective.
“[In this album] we’re attempting to reframe the way in which folks view Haitian roots music. Rasin Sèch is commonly stigmatized, as a result of it’s so carefully aligned to Vodou,” Ignace stated.
“We would like to have the ability to current the music in its integrity and speak about how actually complicated it’s.”
Rasin Sèch is a type of rasin, or Haitian roots music that makes use of solely percussion and vocals, with out guitars or synthesizers.
Ignace’s work with Kriyol Collective began in 2017, when she invited Rasin Okan musicians to collaborate on health-centered programming that makes use of the humanities as a car for schooling and therapeutic.
“We at the moment are known as an motion group, utilizing the humanities as a form of mechanism to boost consciousness and create programming… particularly for Afro-Caribbean immigrants,” she stated. “The musicians that I work with have at all times been actually integral to what Kriyol Collective is ready to do and what it does. They’re the cultural bearers of these drum traditions and people songs and the dance for Haitian conventional dance. These three issues can’t be separated.”
All of the songs on Jou Ma Lonje are authentic compositions by Jean Montina, often known as Maestro or Sanba Mayombe.
Within the rasin custom, a sanba is a title for somebody who makes use of music to channel tales and the religious realm, Ignace explains.
“A singer, somebody who sings properly, shouldn’t be a sanba. You must have that particular reward. And Montina does.”
The observe “Gad Yon Mirak” is especially emblematic of the album’s name to consciousness. Structured as a medley, the track weaves collectively tales reflecting the Haitian folks’s resistance after the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
“He’s principally speaking to us about that instantaneous… when the folks created their very own motion known as ‘Bwa Kale,’” Ignace stated.
“It was a resistance motion the place they have been principally going out and looking for the folks inflicting havoc.”
In that rebellion, the picket stick emerged as an emblem of native self‑protection, typically carried alongside inexperienced leaves, which represented renewal and unity. Collectively, these components embodied a community-driven effort to reclaim public security within the absence of efficient policing.
The lyrics additionally affirm the enduring energy of Vodou. “He’s reaffirming a dedication to conventional Haitian tradition, in addition to Vodou, the apply, the Afro-Indigenous apply from Haiti,” she stated. “And saying that basically till the day he dies and till the Haitians are now not right here, we are going to at all times be linked to those traditions.”
Though rasin music has advanced by means of bands like RAM and Boukman Eksperyans, rasin Okan is without doubt one of the few teams nonetheless preserving Rasin Sèch.
“For Rasin Okan to be holding on to this for 20 plus years within the diaspora and to be one of many solely teams that performs that exact sound, it’s a reasonably large deal,” Ignace stated. “And I don’t suppose they get sufficient credit score for it.”
The group can even be featured at Cosamba’s educational convention at Nova Southeastern College in Florida this month, the place they are going to current their work with Kriyol Collective. Cosamba is the Congress of Santa Barbara, a scholarly affiliation targeted on Haitian Vodou.
They carry out subsequent on the Brooklyn Museum’s First Saturday occasion on Aug. 2 from 5 to 7 p.m.
“There has solely been a handful of working bands taking part in this explicit type of pure Mizik Rasin over the previous few many years in New York. Rasin Okan is the one ‘band’ I’m conscious of that’s at the moment performing Rasin Sech within the New York space [with both Haitian drums and vocals],” stated Markus Schwartz, a percussionist and mainstay in New York’s Haitian music scene.
“Having two ladies upfront who can each sing and dance actually will increase their presentation and speaks to their significance to the neighborhood.”
For Schwartz, the band highlights a few of the better of “Haitian Vodou drumming,” a method as complicated and culturally vital to the Caribbean as classical music within the Western world.
“Rasin Okan is serving to assist break down a few of the boundaries and stereotypes in the neighborhood about that type of music that’s typically appeared down upon.”