Description
On her new album Sun Without the Heat, McCalla brings more
playfulness and joy than she has on previous records when she speaks to
the concerns that have shaped her career, mainly including an ethos in
which you must look back at lost and erased histories before you can
embrace a forward vision of Afrofuturism and the importance of music
making to heal and forge relationships across differences
Across Sun Without the Heat's ten tracks, she achieves this with music that
combines jazz, Haitian Twoubadou, American blues, folk and Brazilian
Tropicalismo.
Born in New York City to Haitian emigrants and activists, McCalla possesses a
stunning mastery of the cello, tenor banjo and guitar. A founding member of Our
Native Daughters alongside Rhiannon Giddens, Amysthyst Kiah and Allison
Russell and an alumna of Grammy award-winning band The Carolina Chocolate
Drops, McCalla has also received considerable praise and attention for her solo
works, including 2014's Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes, which
prompted the New York Times to rave that "her voice is disarmingly natural, and
her settings are elegantly succinct" and 2022's Breaking The Thermometer (4/5
review from The Guardian)
Lyrically on Sun Without the Heat, McCalla draws from the writings of Black
feminist Afrofuturist thinkers Octavia Butler, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Adrienne
Maree Brown, among others, with frequent themes being grief, connection and
motherhood. Like these authors, McCalla is thinking hard about collaboration as
a means of creative expression, community thinking, personal salvation, and
rectifying social injustice. "The stories we've been told about ourselves and the
stories that we have to learn to undo the stories we've been told," she explains."
Sometimes these are painful stories to tell. This is especially vivid in the title
song, "Sun Without the Heat.""
CD Tracks: Open the Road / Scaled to Survive / Take Me Away / So I'll Go / Tree /
Sun Without the Heat / Tower / Love We Had / Give Yourself a Break / I Want to
Believe
LP Tracks: Open the Road / Scaled to Survive / Take Me Away / So I'll Go / Tree /
Sun Without the Heat / Tower / Love We Had / Give Yourself a Break / I Want to
Believe
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