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Editor’s Note, January 25, 2010: In mid-December, GRAMMY.com featured this feature on musicologist Alan Lomax’s trip to Haiti in the 1930s. His recording of Haiti’s culture and the recent release of that material may now prove more important than ever given the devastation caused by the January 12 earthquake.

On January 22, several prominent music, film, and television stars collaborated on the multi-network broadcast of “Hope For Haiti Now,” a useful concert to raise funds for disaster relief programs in Haiti. The accompanying website provides a number of ways to donate to help save and rebuild Haiti.

In mid-December 1936, then-21-year-old musicologist Alan Lomax arrived in Haiti on a journey of musical and cultural research and field gathering. He brought along a cumbersome disc-cutting unit and a set of aluminum discs. Over the next four months, he struggled with language barriers. Intestinal malaria. Dealing with the separation from his fiancée Elizabeth Harold; liquidity problems; and the difficulties of receiving standard supply deliveries—all while carrying his 155-pound tape recorder across the country without a car.

Despite these obstacles, by March 1937, Lomax had amassed nearly 50 hours of music and sound across 1,500 recordings, six 8mm black and white short films, and hundreds of pages of notes. It was a great effort, but for years it all seemed to be of no use.

In the late 1970s Lomax examined his recordings in Haiti, but the noise and distortion included in it discouraged any idea of ​​the launch. (His Haitian expedition was the last time he used an aluminum disc system for his field recordings.) The project was postponed indefinitely until the late 1990s, when the Association for Cultural Equality and the Alain Lomax Archives commissioned a project that resulted in preservation work. By the Center for American Folklife of the Library of Congress.

The aluminum discs were transported to the LOC Audio Laboratory in March 2000. It took nearly 10 years to transfer audio from source and catalog discs and to restore and master the recordings. Three-time GRAMMY Award-winning producer Steve Rosenthal and GRAMMY Award-winning engineer Warren Russell Smith, along with engineer Will Berlind, worked at the Magic Shop studio in New York City, using digital techniques to peel off layer by layer of noise to reveal the music underneath.

More than 70 years later, the result is Alan Lomax’s stunning collection of boxes in Haiti. Released in November, the collection was overseen by Haitian ethnomusicologist and scholar Gage Avril and includes 10 volumes on CD featuring Lomax’s collection of music and films; A copy of Lomax magazine (edited by his niece Eileen Harold); facsimile of his annotated map; and a hardcover book containing extensive, well-thought-out notes on the people, historical circumstances of his voyage, and music.

“I’ve been working on Lomax projects since 1995,” Rosenthal says. “The thing you always have to remember about the Lomax project is that you need to keep a sense of place in the recording. It’s an interesting battle where you want to remove the noise and get the music back, but you don’t want to sterilize it. You need to keep some of the original ‘issues’ because that will help you understand where registration and how to register it.

The first volume, Meringue and Urban Music from Haiti, presents a style that Lomax has given brief attention as he considered the music of urban elites. Samples suggest a sweet elegant blend of Caribbean canyons and jazz influences.

Other volumes feature Mardi Gras music, carnival music, Rara music, nursery rhymes, work songs, examples of the nearly extinct romantic song, and French-style songs – sung with a mixture of Old French and Criel. The collection addresses one of the most interesting and controversial aspects of Haitian culture, especially given the sensational reports of the time, and the collection also features Lomax recordings of Voudou ritual music and ceremonial music of the various branches within Vodou. “Lomax was the first to record the Vudou concert from start to finish,” Averill notes.

One of the main partners in the project is the Miami-based Green Family Foundation. A full set of recordings is due to be returned to Haiti in the spring of 2010 Kimberly Green, president of the Green Family Foundation says, “The organization we hope will house the actual collection and will make it available to everyone is FOKAL.” [Fondation Connaissance et Liberté]Which includes a library and many educational programs.”

When he arrived in Haiti, Lomax had already worked alongside his father, folklorist John Avery Lomax, and their field efforts throughout the northeastern, southwestern, western, and southern regions of the United States had produced the book American Ballads And Folk Song, the leading recording group of folk music. Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly.

Lomax’s extraordinary 60-year career would have taken him from Kentucky to Galicia, Spain. And the impact of his work on cultures around the world is immeasurable. His archival contributions include the first-ever recordings of Woody Guthrie, Muddy Waters, and David “Honey Boy” Edwards, as well as recordings of Pete Seeger and Jelly Roll Morton. In the mid-1990s, he completed work on Global Jukebox, an interactive software tool designed to organize and synthesize findings from anthropology and musicology. Lomax died in 2002 at the age of 87, and received the Recording Academy Trustees Award posthumously in 2003.

But in 1935, Lomax continued his experiences with his father on expeditions to the islands of the Georgia Sea, Florida and the Bahamas. According to Avril, what he saw and heard during those trips cemented his interest in the African roots of African American culture and the connections between African cultures rooted in the Americas.

“He was really listening and thinking about how music relates across national borders,” Avril says. “[Lomax collaborator] falsely [Neal Hurston] She was interested in Haiti, which she got from reading a book during the Haitian occupation. They spoke of perhaps going to Haiti, which they considered the most African-influenced region of the New World.”

The difference between Alan and other ethnographers was that he placed a strong emphasis on sound recording as his methodology. [Anthropologist Melville] Herskovits and others who went to Haiti used recordings, but were generally writing. Alan wanted to score. This is what he brought to the ethnography of the Caribbean. He was interested in producing what he later called an alternative oral history.”

A fascinating anthropological document and an amazing collection of music, Haiti’s Alain Lomax is a fine example of a people’s history depicted in audio and film.

(Fernando Gonzalez is a contributing editor for the International Journal of Music, based in Miami.)

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