It’s going to take more than a travel warning to sway Haiti’s international music festival off course. They just landed one of the biggest names in jazz.
As the husband-and-wife duo behind Haiti’s premier international musical event, Joel Widmaier and Milena Sandler Widmaier are used to presenting major jazz celebrities: Branford Marsalis, Jed Levy Quartet, Julie Michels of Canada. and Cuba’s Gonzalo Rubalcaba, to name a few.
But for years, there was one star in the jazz universe they could never seem to get: Miami-born Cécile McLorin Salvant.
So last year, as the couple began planning for this year’s 13th edition of the Port-au-Prince International Jazz Festival, they did something unusual.
“We went to the family,” Sandler Widmaier said. “It’s not like us to do that but I sent a message to her mother and said, ‘I don’t understand why we can’t get her. We have been asking a year in advance to get her, not only for the jazz festival, but for International Jazz Day as well, and every time the answer is ‘No.’ If she doesn’t want to, OK, and I will stop bothering the agent.’ “
Léna McLorin Salvant responded on behalf of her daughter: “She wants to. Haiti is really dear to her.”
And this is how after five years of trying, the PAP Jazz Festival, which kicks off this weekend and runs through Jan. 26, landed one of jazz music’s most-watched artist, Cécile McLorin Salvant, who also happens to be part Haitian.
“We usually have headliners who are always foreigners. Now, it’s a Haitian,” said Sandler Widmaier, who has long tracked McLorin Salvant’s rise from virtual unknown to 2010 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition winner to multiple Grammy Award winner. “She is the one female jazz singer that everybody wants right now, and so we are really proud to have her, really happy.”
For McLorin Salvant, 29, playing the festival is not just long overdue, it’s a chance to go back to her roots, both as a musician and as the daughter of a Haitian physician and a French-Guadeloupean mother.
“There is always this idea of reconnecting, of re-familiarizing yourself,” she said. “Haiti is not that huge but culturally it has given so much to the world; if you look at the history of jazz too, Haiti and Haitian music is super-fundamental to early, early jazz in New Orleans.
