Singer-songwriter Leyla McCalla’s music can be described as truly “multicultural.”
Born in New York City, the child of Haitian immigrants, she plays cello, banjo and guitar. McCalla’s most recent studio album, her fifth, Sun Without the Heat from 2024 is a unique mix of Afrobeat, Tropicalismo and American Roots music.
The album’s title track draws inspiration from an 1857 speech given by American social reformer and abolitionist Frederick Douglas: “You want the crops without the plow / You want the rain without the thunder / You want the ocean without the roar of its waters.”
Douglass argues that liberation and equity are not possible without committing to transformative action.
McCalla is a founding member of Our Native Daughters, a group of female banjo players, with Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah and Allison Russell. She was also a member of the Grammy Award-winning group Carolina Chocolate Drops, which also included Giddens.
McCalla’s upcoming appearance at the University of Washington’s Meany Center in Seattle. alongside American roots master Taj Mahal, is due in part to this ongoing collaboration with Giddens, who is serving as the Meany Center's 2024-25 Artistic Partner.
The performance is part of a five-artist roster curated by Giddens for the Meany season: The Transcendence of Cultural Connections. Each performance features artists who cross borders, cultures and time.
“Purity is a myth,” Giddens said. “We are never without something to mix with — the strength of one plus the strength of another makes a strength that can withstand armies.”
Beginning at age 12, McCalla was on track to be a classical cellist, studying at the esteemed Juilliard School in New York City. She was drawn to a life in music.
“I loved the camaraderie and community building that music requires. I loved being a part of that, learning new music and hearing all the parts come in. I remember getting chills on the back of my neck, and feeling that this is what my life needs to be about," McCalla told KNKX.
She became active in chamber music groups and orchestras, until she moved to Ghana as a teenager and became “completely derailed from the conservatory track.”
“It opened up this whole other world of seeing what music could be in my life. Am I really supposed to be focused on learning western European classical music, or is there something else that I should be looking for? “ she recalled.
A turning point came when she returned to New York at the age of 18, and heard cellist Rufus Cappadocia playing with a band called Voodoo Drums of Haiti.
“I remember thinking ‘okay, this is the thing!’ This speaks to me on an entirely different level. And that changed my life. After that I started to orient towards learning different styles of music, and being able to play by ear. That was the real transformation for me.”
She first encountered Taj Mahal when he was an informal creative consultant to the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Part of the mission of that group was to talk about the history of old-time African American music, a culture that was largely commodified by white Americans.
The April 12 show at Meany Center is titled Black Banjo, and both Taj Mahal and McCalla will be playing banjo on each others’ songs. The banjo has a complicated history in the United States, going back to the 17th century, when enslaved Africans recreated the gourd-shaped, goat-skin stringed instruments from their homelands.
In the early 1800s banjo became part of a phenomenon called "blackface minstrelsy." The first minstrel shows were performed in 1830s by white performers with blackened faces and tattered clothing who imitated and mimicked enslaved Africans on Southern plantations. Thomas Dartmouth Rice, known as the “Father of Minstrelsy,” developed the first popularly known blackface character, “Jim Crow” in 1830.
McCalla said the instrument called to her.
“It’s become a big part of my understanding of the Black Atlantic, and opened up conversations about the commodification of Black culture in white spaces," she said.
English sociologist Paul Gilroy describes the Black Atlantic as a “culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once, a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to produce something new.”
“A lot of Black people distanced themselves from old-time American music, because of the harmful racial stereotyping. But this music was Black music. What Black people created in fiddle and banjo music, those spaces became white spaces for decades until the Carolina Chocolate Drops," McCalla explained.
“I see all the layers of it historically. I see how cultural advocacy, activism and history can become a part of performance, I see myself as part of that lineage.”
Leyla McCalla performs Black Banjo with Taj Mahal at the Meany Center on April 12.
