Leyla McCalla

Haitian-American vocalist, composer, arranger, cellist, and multi-instrumentalist Leyla McCalla fuses folk, jazz, and classical influences with the Louisiana traditions that define her adopted home in New Orleans. She belonged to the string band Carolina Chocolate Drops between 2011 and 2013, contributing to the Grammy Award-winning ensemble’s fourth studio album, Leaving Eden. Her first solo recording, Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes, arrived in 2014; subsequent projects include the 2022 multidisciplinary music, dance, and theater piece Breaking the Thermometer and the 2024 expressive, genre-hopping Sun Without the Heat. Beyond her individual work, McCalla participates in the folk and roots supergroup Our Native Daughters.

She entered the world in New York City to Haitian immigrant parents, grew up in a New Jersey suburb, lived for two years in Ghana during adolescence, returned to attend Smith College, and later pursued cello performance and chamber music studies at New York University. After graduation she boldly moved to New Orleans, determined to perform with her cello in the French Quarter. There she immersed herself in Louisiana Creole culture, drawing particular inspiration from fiddlers such as Canray Fontenot and Bébé Carrière, whose approaches she adapted to the cello. While busking on the street, she encountered Tim Duffy of the Music Maker Relief Foundation, who connected her with the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

Once she had toured with the Chocolate Drops and appeared on Leaving Eden, McCalla turned her focus to a solo path. Vari-Colored Songs, her tribute to Langston Hughes, surfaced first in Europe in 2013, where both the London Times and Songlines magazine named it album of the year; the Music Maker Relief Foundation released it worldwide in early 2014, after which she toured the United States, Europe, and Israel. Her second album, A Day for the Hunter, a Day for the Prey, took its title from a Haitian proverb and incorporated songs in English, French, and Haitian Creole, featuring Marc Ribot, Rhiannon Giddens, Louis Michot of the Lost Bayou Ramblers, and New Orleans singer-songwriter Sarah Quintana; Jazz Village issued the set in May 2016.

For 2019’s Capitalist Blues, McCalla enlisted Jimmy Horn of King James & the Special Men as producer for an expansive collection that incorporated Haitian, Brazilian, Cajun, zydeco, and calypso elements. That same year she joined Rhiannon Giddens, Allison Russell, and Amythyst Kiah in Our Native Daughters, releasing the widely praised Songs of Our Native Daughters on Smithsonian Folkways. The inventive 2022 project Breaking the Thermometer merged newly written pieces with traditional Haitian material and archival broadcasts from the nation’s first Kreyòl-language radio station. Drawing on folk, American blues, Brazilian Tropicalismo, jazz, and Haitian Twoubadou, 2024’s Sun Without the Heat presented a confident collection centered on themes of grief, motherhood, social injustice, and Afrofuturism.