Publication: The Miami Herald
Author: Jacqueline Charles
Date: January 17, 2013
Like New Orleans, Haiti has experienced great suffering - poverty, disease, natural disaster.
So perhaps it’s only fitting that a week after an unlucky Haiti marked the third anniversary of its cataclysmic Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake, it is one of New Orleans’ great musical sons - jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis - who will open this year’s Port-au-Prince International Jazz Festival.
“Being from New Orleans, Haiti has a kind of mythic status there,” said Marsalis, 52, who performs Friday in Jacmel at the Tourism Port and again Saturday in Port-au-Prince at a former sugar cane plantation-turned outdoor concert venue, Parc Historique de la Canne a Sucre.
“We have a lot of similar traditions; relationships with Vodou, with music and with rhythm that’s very, very different from all of the states in the United States,” he said. Read more »
