Microfundo correspondent Amy Bracken talks with Kera Washington, bandleader for the Afro Caribbean group Zili Misik.
The all-women band Zili Misik is based in
Boston and only occasionally tours outside New England, but each of its songs
takes the listener on a long voyage through a spectrum of musical styles, and
even languages.
The band’s name comes from the strong female
Haitian spirit Ezili, and Haiti has the strongest presence in Zili’s songs, but
the eight-member band’s focus is much broader than that.
Washington: “We’re definitely not trying to be a Haitian band.
We’re not trying to represent ourselves as Haitian or as representative of
Haitian music. We are representative of African roots and of African Diaspora
coming together.”
That’s band leader Kera Washington.
Washington says such music has a particular resonance with her as an African
American, but she defines African Diaspora in the broadest way.
Washington: “All humanity started in Africa, so we’re
taking humanity as an African Diaspora.”
In addition to Haiti, Zili’s songs use
musical styles from Ghana, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Cape Verde, Brazil, Cuba, Israel,
and the US.
Zili band members have eclectic musical
backgrounds, and roots in the US, Trinidad, Japan, and the Philippines. English
is the native language of all the band’s vocalists, but listeners are often
fooled.
Washington: “Inevitably, someone will come up and ask okay
who’s from Haiti, who’s from brazil, okay, who’s from.. because I think the
assumption is if we’re interested in that music then it must be because we have
a personal connection, and there is a personal connection, but it’s not
necessarily a biological one. It’s definitely a cultural one.”
Washington is from California and grew up
moving around the US with her academic mom. Her mother got her into music early
– piano, flute, choir… she even played the bass for a bit. At Wellesley
College, she took music classes, but something was missing.
Washington: “I loved them, yet the music that I wanted to study
wasn’t always included in those classes. The music that I was most interested
in, this music of the Caribbean, folkloric music of the Caribbean was taught in
the black studies department, so I went and tried to find out why, and in
talking to one of the professors who became the chair, he told me about
ethnomusicology and how I could study this music as music, as part of the music
department.”
Washington began to work with Wellesley
Haitian ethnomusicology professor Gerdes Fleurant.
Washington: “When we first had those classes, he told me you
can’t understand music unless you’re inside it, unless you play it, unless you
experience it that way, and walk around campus walking in rhythm, you know? And
having three or four different rhythms in your head at the same time. You hear
things differently. You understand life differently.”
Fleurant taught Washington percussion, which
she now plays for Zili, and a fascination with Haiti.
Washington: “I feel a great connection to Haiti and also
to what Haiti has given this part of the hemisphere, this part of the world,
which we don’t think about often. We think about the poverty in Haiti, we think
about the political strife, we think about problems in Haiti. We don’t
generally think as a community about the richness of Haiti and the incredible
gifts of freedom that Haiti gave, particularly to the Diaspora.”
Beyond Haiti’s extraordinary history,
including a successful slave revolt that made it the world’s first black
republic, Washington pays tribute to its contribution to the arts. As a
graduate student at Wesleyan, she wrote about studying Haitian sacred music in
a secular context. Then, as a PhD student at Brown, she researched a Haitian
dance and music pioneer, whom she visits from time to time on the outskirts of
Port-au-Prince.
But even under the tutelage of Fleurant at
Wellesley, Washington’s learning went well beyond Haiti.
Washington: “So it started out in Haiti, but then we
learned in my study with him about connections that Haiti had to all sorts of
musical styles you wouldn’t think of, and that opened up my study of
ethnomusicology and connection to other musical instruments and eventually led
to Zili.”
Zili formed nine years ago, when Washington
found the rest of the band through Craigslist and Berkeley School of Music. But
the influence of Fleurant and those early days at Wellesley is still evident in
Zili’s new album, which is called Zee’lee Mee’seek, spelled in English
phonetics.
Washington: “People really respond to Erzulie, which is funny
because it’s the oldest song that we have. I mean that’s the song we started
with when we started nine years ago in my living room, you know in Jamaica
Plain, in my three room apartment. We started jamming on Erzulie because it’s
the first song that my professor, Gerdes Fleurant, taught me, you know,
Erzulie, oh, Erzulie so, mwen pa genyen mama, mwen pa genyen papa. Yon sel
petit la mwen genyen. Li tombe nan dlo.”
Washington: “That’s the song that I think people respond to,
Erzulie, on this album, also Justice, which is an epic. Laught, it’s almost 9
minutes long. It starts out with a song from Zimbabwe, Nhemumasasa, so it uses
the mbira.”
“And then by the end of it we’re in the land
of reggae, so it travels many different places.”
Washington: “Our songs are political, our songs are historical,
and they have to do with love but they’re not necessarily love songs, so to
have a song like Kuma that speaks directly to love, or falling in love… how do
I know that I love you? I feel it in every beat of the drum. I feel it in your
smile, every line of your smile that I know is yours, you can continue to look,
but you know you’ve already found love… It’s not a typical Zili song.”
This love song, which is about Cape Verde,
grew out of a trip Washington took there on a grant for educators. She
currently teaches integrated arts at a Boston public elementary school, and is
on faculty at Wellesley as a dance and drum ensemble director.
Washington has been musically inspired by
her travels to Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and Israel’s West Bank.
Influences have also been brought by band members’ travels and contact,
locally, with musicians from around the world.
Washington: “We want to combine all of these musics to provide
a reconnection, to create a community that is heard in the music so that it’s
not lost, it doesn’t become a stew, where you can’t really identify different
musical styles but that you begin to hear all these different styles bumping up
against each other and moving together.”
This method of using multiple musical
styles, in a way that shows parallels and distinctions does elicit curiosity
about their origins, which is kind of what Washington is going for.
Washington: “I like that people can see themselves in this music. I also like enjoy that when people who have no connection to Haiti, to Cape Verde, to Brazil, to California, that they feel that connection and it encourages them to go and find out why, find out about the music, find out, outside of Zili, where it comes from, why are people involved in it, what’s it performed for, what’s the tradition, what’s the culture, what’s it like?”
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