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Posted 09.25.05 Like Father, Like Son By Gergana Koleva Bonga is forty-seven years old and says he's never had a headache. When he speaks, his deep African voice rumbles with a rising intonation that ends most of his sentences with questions, but when he defends his drums he sounds dead straight, like a man laying down ageless wisdom. "Before I play, I say, 'If someone come with stomachache, it's gonna go soon if you listen to that song. Headache -- go. Backache -- go away.' Seriously, I never had headache in my life." Then, almost as an afterthought, he says, "Those drums are nothing to be afraid of." His imperfect grammar and damp face, gleaming between a verdant silk bandana and a short-sleeved denim robe, further the impression that he must be from Africa, speaking the pidgin English of formerly colonized black nations. In a way, he is. Bonga, whose real name is Gaston Jean-Baptiste, is a Haitian musician and an houngan (pronounced oun-gan) -- a Vodou priest who lives by the law of the Lwa, the pan-African deities that mediate between humans and the master god Ogun. Like Ogun, Bonga is a master too. He is a maker of Haitian drums and the rhythm he pounds out of them often assists him in summoning the Lwa. The resulting sound is mizik rasin -- the Haitian term for "roots music" -- which, as the country lore has it, honors the spirits and heals the humans. In 1991, Bonga moved to the United States in order to escape Catholic prohibition against mizik rasin back home. Because rasin is an expression of ancestral forest spiritualism, or Vodou, the measure was decidedly political. He marvels at how the European colonizers succeeded in passing down their disdain for the beliefs of Haitian slaves to the country's own people, many of whom today teach their children that Vodou is "the devil." Bonga says that his drums have healed many people. "Sometimes patients in hospital ask for music, and they send me." He wants to open a vodou temple in Pennsylvania, like the one his father bequeathed him in their hometown of Croix-de-Mission, in the southwestern part of Haiti. In his American temple, anyone and not just the gravely ill would be able to come in and seek remedy for their ailment. On a recent hospital visit in Schenectady, in upstate New York, Bonga brought his drums to soothe the distress of patients with cerebral palsy. Before that, at a Los Angeles church he worked his magic alongside Grace Jones, the sight of whom alone can perhaps cure the sick. *** "You know reggae?" asks James Jean-Baptiste, Bonga's 23-year-old son. "Rasin is like reggae. We just haven't had someone like Bob Marley," he says, explaining why the mizik rasin art form is largely unfamiliar to American audiences. Known artistically as "Tiga Tiganou," he is drum craftsman junior and, like his father, member of several Haitian drum ensembles. Tiga, who is about five-feet-eight and very lean, carries a heavy load. He wears a bright navy-yellow head wrap towering about two heads above his own. Hidden inside it is his opulent mane of thick black dreadlocks. When performing, he removes the wrap and lets them creep down his chest and back like giant larvae. "Someone more pop-oriented would look at Bonga and Tiga and think they're something out of a museum," says in a phone interview Markus Schwartz, a San Francisco Bay area percussionist who plays with the Haitian drum band Mozayik. A childhood friend of Tiga's since 1992, when he took his first trip to Haiti to acquaint himself with the craft of Haitian drum music and met Bonga, who became his teacher, Schwartz has a fan's admiration and a peer's appreciation for the two men. "Their music has a pureness and a simpleness, it's not too sophisticated, and it doesn't go over anybody's head." *** On a frigid February night at Satalla, a night venue in trendy Chelsea known for its international vibe and live music performances, the Jean-Baptistes' drum magic rolls out in one total sweep from under their hands and from the hands and lips of the members of the Vodou Drums of Haiti. Surrounded by three other musicians and as many female background singers, the father and son drum, blow, peal and hoot their way into the ears of the elegant, ethnically assorted audience. As their event is taking place at the crack of spring (and just three days before Ash Wednesday), the band inundates the two-tiered lounge with festive Carnival songs and traditional Vodou rhythms. Bonga, who opens the act by blowing into a huge conch shell, is first to crack the silence before each new song. He yells "Ayibobo!" -- a complex Haitian phrase that generally means "God bless" or "Hallelujah!" -- and sometimes simply pounds for emphasis one of several drums rolling in his feet. "When Bonga hears a drum, he hears a whole band. His personal relationship with drums is very melodic," says Schwartz. Tiga, who plays a variety of instruments, is master of the didjeridoo, an Australian horn that looks like a wooden trumpet and is about six feet long. He says it grabbed his attention when he was touring Australia with his father. To play it, one must rest the wide end at an angle on the floor while blowing air in the mouthpiece. Tiga later explains that its deep gurgling sound imitates the mating call of a kangaroo. Surrounding the drummers are a white musician who throughout the evening hops on and off the stage, switching trumpet for flute and then kone, a primitive one-note trumpet; a black man pealing on an ogan, the iron plate on the digging end of a hoe that in Haitian mythology is believed to be a time-keeper; another Haitian playing the balafone; and a trio of curvy mulatto women in tunics, whose voices treble with acapellas so high as to dim the din of the drums and whose bodies bob and snake with movements so gracious as to be almost spineless. "If I didn't know they were from Haiti, I'd think they're from an island off the coast of Africa," says Kim Paris, a Detroit DJ visiting New York who watches the band's delivery from her table. On the impromptu dance floor beside her, a middle-aged woman with a red tank top and a white-bearded man with a red button-up attempt a random footwork pattern, energized by the performers' zeal. *** "When I was young," begins Bonga, "that's what I used to do. Anybody older than me, I'm watching you. Anyone play the drum, I'm there. I know how to cut my drum, I know how to make my drum, I know how to play my drum. But now the young generation, they want to play compas only." Mizik rasin, while recognized as Haiti's oldest musical folk form, is radically different from compas (pronounced "Compas music, I cannot talk about story. I can talk about sex. But cultural music, not only sex, but about how to behave, how to respect each other...politics too," says the drummer. As the name of Bonga's band suggests, their music draws on just the kind of tribal African polytheism that the first Haitian slaves brought with them from the motherland. Tiga says there is no other way it could have been. "Vodou is me. I didn't step into Vodou." He recalls that Haitian lore has it that when choosing a tree for a drum, one must say a prayer for the tree's spirit that will make its home in the drum after the tree is dead. Then, a story comes to mind of a man from his town who three years ago started cutting a tree but forgot to pray for its spirit. After he hit the trunk three times with his axe, the man went blind. Today a similar curse is thrown over the whole of Haiti, muses Bonga. He believes his country is in need of a miracle. "When I was a kid, I used to lay down in my bed and hear the drum. When I hear the drum, whatever time it is, I get up and follow the sound. But now when I lay down in my bed, I hear guns. People shooting. No more drums." |
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