Flashmag September 2019 www.flashmag.net
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Discovery
Leyla Mc calla
Artists to follow
The Capitalist Blues is Leyla McCalla’s way of processing the current political environment, where many of the issues are financial, but they’re rarely simply financial. “It feels like everyone’s in a pressure cooker in this country,” she says. The album is McCalla’s third, after Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes (2013) and A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey (2016). Those albums and her time as a member of the African-American string band The Carolina Chocolate Drops presented her vision in songs that revealed the realities that
people lived, often expressed in metaphors. She explored Haitian Creole identity issues in songs with arrangements that focused on the song. accept the speculative compromise.
She often sang and accompanied herself on cello, banjo, or guitar. The New York-born McCalla has lived in New Orleans since 2010, and A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey broadened not only her examination of Creole identities but her sound as she brought in a number of musicians to add fiddle, clarinet, piano, electric guitar, and additional voices. Her growing relationship to the city’s musical