For decades, a chunk of Haitian history sat, untouched, on an obscure shelf in the Library of Congress in Washington: huge piles of aluminum discs in little cardboard jackets containing more than 1,500 recordings made in Haiti in the 1930s by famed folklorist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax.
Unearthed in the late 1990s, the find contained more than 50 hours of recorded music and six films. Needing help to deal with the massive discovery, Lomax’s daughter, Anna Lomax Wood, called in Gage Averill.
Now dean of arts at the University of British Columbia, Averill is considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on Haitian music. But even he was unaware of this treasure trove.
“I was gobsmacked that this existed. It was an extraordinary archive,” Averill said this week. “There are more recordings in there I think, ethnographic recordings, field recordings, than have been made in the years since.”
Last week, the recordings – released this year as the box set Alan Lomax in Haiti: Recordings for the Library of Congress, 1936-1937 – received two Grammy nominations: best historical album (up against the Beatles anthology, among others) and best album notes. Averill, who wrote the liner notes – a book, essentially – is nominated in the latter category.
His notes begin with the incredible story of Lomax’s travels in Haiti. It was late 1936, Lomax was 21, and Haiti was at a critical point. The U.S. occupation had recently ended and ethnographers flooded in to study what was considered to be the most African nation in the Western hemisphere. Lomax – who in his career also touted the talents of Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly – wanted to capture the music and stories of this pivotal time. He recorded everything from Voodoo ceremonies to Boy Scout troops.
“Alan was a passionate devotee of the folk,” says Averill. “And he wanted to get to regular folks, to people who wouldn’t have had a chance to be heard otherwise.”
An ethnomusicologist whose other chief musical interest is American barbershop harmony, Averill, 56, has been travelling to Haiti since 1987, spending long stretches of time studying music there. Born and raised in the United States, Averill is married to a Trinidadian-Canadian and was at the University of Toronto for six years before starting at UBC in September.
When presented with the opportunity to work on the Lomax recordings in 2007 (it took some time to get the project off the ground), Averill hesitated. He was dean at U of T’s Mississauga campus. His daughter was 4. He knew that the project – to transcribe, translate and interpret the many, many recordings and then select and arrange them into thematic discs – would be mammoth.
“I thought ... about whether I could do this under the pressures of being a dean. It wasn’t obvious that I could. Actually I thought I couldn’t.... But [record producer] David [Katznelson] refused to let me jump ship. Then my family – my daughter and my wife and I – had a powwow and they said something to the effect of we’ll see you in about eight months.”
They weren’t that far off. On weekdays, Averill worked on the project from 4 to 8 a.m. before heading to his job, then returned to the recordings from 8 p.m. until midnight. Weekends he went flat out.
The process was part ethnomusicology, part detective work. Averill was tasked with matching the scratchy recordings with the disjointed notes Lomax had scribbled into various notebooks. But the numbers didn’t always correspond, and Lomax’s handwriting was terrible. Averill went through Lomax’s receipts – for musicians, taxis – trying to figure out where he had travelled and when. In one case, he and his collaborators spent 20 hours trying to figure out the name of one small rural ensemble.
