Jowee Omicil - Soundtrack for a historic fight for freedom

Multi-instrumentalist Jowee Omicil, whose first instrument is the alto saxophone, was born in Montreal, Canada. His mother died at an early age. Omicil was largely kept away from Creole culture by his father, a Haitian pastor. His father also spoke French at home, at best he would occasionally scold him in Haitian Creole. He also preferred to listen to the dignified chansonnier Charles Aznavour rather than the feverish rhythms of his homeland.  

However, the Haitian colony in Montreal was so large, with around 100,000 people, that Jowee Omicil inevitably came into contact with Haitian pop music as a child, which is partly rooted in voodoo, a religion with African roots that was, to put it mildly, anything but socially acceptable for a Christian pastor. Nevertheless, Jowee Omicil began to engage intensively with his roots and ultimately to identify with them. He even learned Haitian Creole.

Omicil then met the Haitian singer Manno Charlemagne, once mayor of Port-au-Prince and later, during the dictatorship, a prominent resistance fighter. He encouraged him to take a closer look at Haiti and its history. The most poignant result of this preoccupation is the current album "Spiritual Healing: Bwa Kayiman Freedom Suite". It recalls a conspiratorial gathering of freedom fighters of African descent in the Bois Caiman, the crocodile forest in the north of the island. As part of a voodoo ritual, the uprising was planned there that is considered to be the beginning of the Haitian revolution around 1800. What made this revolution so special, or one could even say: healing, was that it was one of the few examples of a successful rebellion by enslaved black people. At the end of this mass uprising was an independent state led by a government of black people. Jowee Omicil's concept album, recorded in a single take as if in a conspiratorial ritual, is the soundtrack to this struggle for freedom. It is brilliant how the musician and composer uses the simplest of means to acoustically lead his listeners directly into the forest of that time, picking up on the mood of the voodoo ritual, translating discourse and conspiratorial exchanges of opinion into sounds and noises, bundling polyrhythmically powerful energies, hurling them out into the world and thereby transforming the pain inflicted by dehumanizing colonial injustice into healing determination.

Incidentally, Jowee Omicil now lives in Miami and Paris, two important cities in the Haitian diaspora. In France, where the current album was created, he is known simply as "le petit genie du jazz".