As the son of legendary Haitian musician Boulo Valcourt, Steeve Valcourt heard plenty of stories about the deep ties between his homeland and New Orleans while growing up in Port-au-Prince.
Beyond the shared history as French colonies, the territories became inextricably linked in the aftermath of the Haitian revolution and civil war, when the population of New Orleans doubled in 1809 with the arrival of thousands of white, free black and formerly enslaved Haitians.
Two centuries later the shared cultural currents run as deeply as ever, though Haiti’s immeasurable contributions to the Crescent City’s vast musical heritage often go overlooked, even by sophisticated Port-au-Prince players. For Steeve Valcourt, it wasn’t until the all-star band he co-founded, Lakou Mizik, played the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 2017 that he fully understood New Orleans as a kindred Caribbean realm.
“Walking down the street with bands performing on every corner, it was exactly the same vibe as home,” he said on a recent phone call with The Chronicle while walking in Port-au-Prince, the street sounds from Haiti’s capital buzzing in the background. “You see the marching bands are very close to what we have in rara music. The rhythms were the same. I thought of the stories I heard about New Orleans growing up and I got it.”
After that transformative experience, Valcourt and Lakou Mizik vocalist Jonas Attis set out to collaborate with some of New Orleans’ leading musicians, a mission that resulted in the groundbreaking 2019 album “HaitiNola.” But aside from brief encounters at Preservation Hall, Lakou Mizik hasn’t performed with its New Orleans brethren, which is part of what makes the New Year’s Eve concert with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band at the Fillmore in San Francisco such an anticipated event.
“We’ve all performed at Preservation Hall, but this is the first time we’ve gotten together,” says bassist, tuba player and Preservation Hall Jazz Band director Ben Jaffe. “We have a shared history and mirror each other quite a bit. We feel like kindred spirits, cultural and musically. There’s a lot of interaction and communication, and often times we don’t even discuss how we’re going to play a song. The arrangements happen very fluidly.”
“HaitiNola” is far more than a musical conversation with Preservation Hall.
Lakou Mizik recorded part of the album in the private studio of Win Butler and Haitian Canadian Régine Chassagne, the husband-and-wife team behind the Montreal indie rock band Arcade Fire. Working with producer Eric Heigle, the drummer for the Grammy-winning Cajun band the Lost Bayou Ramblers, Lakou Mizik joined forces with a diverse cast of New Orleans stars, including Tank and the Bangas’ Tarriona Ball, Trombone Shorty, Cyril Neville and Leyla McCalla.
It’s a brilliant new chapter for a dynamic, multigenerational collective of Haitian musicians who came together in the wake of the devastating 7.0 earthquake that brought widespread death and destruction to the nation in 2010. Steeped in traditional kanaval songs, twobadou ballads and a myriad of Vodou incantational rhythms as well as contemporary styles like konpas and zouk, the septet made a powerful first impression with its 2016 debut album “Wa Di Yo.” “HaitiNola” offered something entirely new.
“This meeting with great New Orleans musicians is a really big deal,” Valcourt said. “It’s never been done before. And from the get-go, we found ways to blend where at a certain point you can’t say, ‘I feel the New Orleans or the Haitian vibe.’ It’s one thing. It’s not really a mix. It’s a symbol, an example of collectively, a way of saying let’s build more bridges, not walls.”
For much of the history of Preservation Hall, which was founded in 1961 by Jaffe’s parents, the institution was dedicated to maintaining and showcasing traditional New Orleans jazz. In recent years, Preservation Hall has increasingly looked outward, seeking to affirm New Orleans as the northernmost outpost of the Caribbean. “A Tuba to Cuba,” the 2018 documentary film and the Sub Pop Records soundtrack album, captured an earlier chapter of Preservation Hall’s re-envisioning.
“These trips to Cuba and Haiti have been life changing,” Jaffe says. “It wasn’t about what we were creating. It was about participating in the moment, letting go of any notion of time.”
Which also sounds like the description of an epic New Year’s celebration and an ideal state of mind to greet a new decade.
Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Lakou Mizik: 9 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 31. $70. The Fillmore, 1805 Geary Blvd., S.F. www.thefillmore.com