Brian Slattery Photos
Leyla McCalla.
A flurry of rainstorms throughout the afternoon on Saturday didn’t keep the CT Folk Festival and Green Expo out of Edgerton Park — nor did it keep stalwart listeners away, to hear from some of the finest voices of two different generations of artists upholding traditions and carrying them ably through the present and into the future.
Folk veteran Tom Rush took the stage at around 5 p.m., with looming clouds rushing in from the horizon. By then the festival had been on for several hours, featuring Inner Groove, Santos de Palo, Crys Matthews, and Ali McGuirk, and the festival’s green expo, a series of vendors, had been set up all afternoon. Food trucks stationed on the road through the park were doing steady business.
Despite the obviously impending storm, Rush proceeded through his set with the ambling confidence of an old pro. He had headlined a folk festival in New Haven back in 1991, and as Rush pointed out, “2024 represents my 63rd annual farewell tour.” Rolling Stone credits Rush as one of the architects of the singer-songwriter era, giving the careers of Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, and James Taylor an early boost and helping propel them to stardom. Those names and others graced his onstage patter with a humility that only bolstered his credentials.
He began his set with a long and funny story-song about people down on their luck. “I usually dedicate this song to myself, but given what we’ve all been through, I’m going to dedicate this to everybody,” he said. “We’re all making the best of a bad situation,” the chorus went. “We’re in this together, you and me.”
He told stories of the early days of the folk revival in Cambridge, where he was as a college student. “There was admittedly a certain irony in a bunch of Harvard kids singing about how bad it was in the coal mines,” he said. “But we figured we would make up in sincerity what we lacked in authenticity.” He talked about crossing paths with Joni Mitchell in the 60s, very early in her career, and being blown away even then.
“I showed Joni some open chords and she went to Mars with them,” he said, a bit of awe still in his voice. Then he added, “David Crosby says he taught Joni open chords, but that doesn’t matter, because I taught David.
Rush’s songs were entrenched in the style of the 1970s in the best sense, with close connections to the folk revival, and to the blues sources that inspired them. They were by turns funny and sweet, sad and sharp, and it felt a shame when his set was cut short just before 6 p.m. by the sky opening up and pouring torrents of rain into the park.
Kaleta and Super Yamba Band.
Those who had been sitting or standing on the lawn ran for cover under the numerous canopies CT Folk and the vendors had set up for the day. As the minutes went by, some decided to call it a day. Others availed themselves of the beer and wine tent and waited out the rain in style. By 7 p.m. about half of the people who had been there remained, but they were ready to hear more music, and the festival was ready to provide it.
As soon as the stage was mopped, Kaleta and Super Yamba Band fired it up. Kaleta — a.k.a. Leon Ligan-Majek — was born in Benin and toured and recorded with Fela Kuti, King Sunny Ade, and Lauryn Hill. Where Rush was a veteran of the U.S. singer-songwriter scene, Ligan-Majek, as a guitarist, was an established force in two traditions that, like Rush’s scene, came out of the music of the second half of the 20th century but drew influence from much older music. Juju and Afrobeat — pioneered by King Sunny Ade and Fela Kuti, respectively — both combined the driving rhythms of traditional Yoruba music with modern elements of jazz and psychedelic rock to create sounds that have captivated multiple continents.
This wasn’t the band’s first visit to New Haven, either; the group played at Cafe Nine in 2022. Kaleta and Super Yamba Band’s CT Folk set showed that the band — in addition to Kaleta, Walter Fancourt on sax and percussion, Sean Smith on trumpet, keys and percussion, Eric Burns on guitar, Prince Amu on bass, Evan Frierson on percussion, and Joseph Yount on drums — hadn’t missed a beat.
“How’s everyone doing?” Fancourt called out, and rolled out a joke. “We’re going to take a little break and come right back. Just kidding! We’re here, and we’re dry.”
“High and dry!” someone in the audience shouted.
“It’s not raining any more,” Smith said. “Let’s push the energy forward.”
Without further ado, Super Yamba band raged through a set of originals that created swirling, irresistible rhythms and glorious textures, punctuated by trenchant horn lines and decorated by searching, expansive solos from Kaleta, Fancourt, and Smith, while the rest of the band held down their monstrous grooves. No matter that the temperature was falling and many were still damp from the storm; the audience stayed, warmed by the music.
The evening closed with Leyla McCalla and her band — Nahum Zdybel on guitar, Pete Olynciw on bass, and Caito Sanchez on drums — showing how she was digging ever deeper into her traditions to create music for the present and future. McCalla, who plays cello, tenor banjo, and guitar, hit the national stage first as a member of the pioneering Black stringband the Carolina Chocolate Drops, from 2011 to 2013, but soon embarked on her own career, exploring the roots of traditional American and Haitian music to dive into her own heritage as a Haitian-American and find inspiration by asking hard questions about the tangled histories of both countries. In the past decade, her sound has become richer, more textured, more varied — and more danceable.
“I’m so glad it’s not raining any more!” McCalla said at the beginning of the set, a sentiment met with cheers. The band launched into a set of ripping songs that kept the energy where Super Yamba band had left it, lifted, strong, and driving. If the lyrics often spoke of tougher subjects, the music was entirely welcoming.
“You’re so quiet now!” McCalla remarked between songs. She was met with a strong cheer. She smiled, reassured. “All right, you’re with us,” she said.
McCalla then led the audience further into her art, and the questions she was pursuing. She talked about “feeling vulnerable about some of the lyrics” to a particular song, “Tree,” but added that “by the time it came out, I didn’t care any more.” That, to her, was one of the best things about the creative process. “When you’re ready to share it with the world,” she said, in another sense, “you’ve moved on.”
Her search led her to find inspiration in both Octavia Butler and Frederick Douglass, who she discovered had a pointed conversation with White abolitionists in 1851, who “all agreed that slavery was wrong,” but as Douglass pointed out, disagreed on “the sacrifices they were going to have to make.”
“You can’t just want a change,” she said. “You have to create it.”
As the band’s set began heating up again, a drizzle of rain returned.
“We had a brief window” of no rain, McCalla said, but “now it’s back.”
“We don’t mind the rain,” an audience member said.
“Says one man,” McCalla joked. But no one left.