Music is Literally in His Blood

RAM from Haiti is now a local New Orleans band

BY JAY MAZZA

Richard A. Morse, the founder and co-lead vocalist, along with his wife, Lunise, for the Haitian band RAM, likes to tell audiences that his band began in 1791. That was year that the Haitian revolution started and was also the beginning of Haiti as an independent nation. It was the only successful slave revolt in the Western hemisphere.

Morse believes that without the freedom to create a culture outside of the French colonial system, much of what we know and love about Haiti, including its art, music and the complex drum rhythms rooted in voudou beliefs, wouldn’t exist. Many parts of that culture found its way to New Orleans when thousands of Haitians fled the island following the uprising.

But Morse actually started RAM in 1990 after the then 28-year-old moved to Haiti to explore his familial roots. It took five years to start the band and over time he discovered that Haitians on both sides of his family were involved in music and culture. So, music is literally in his blood.

The members of RAM have been living in New Orleans in the lower Ninth Ward since October 2022. The political/personal safety situation in Haiti had become untenable and with a daughter married to a New Orleanian, the city was a logical place to set up. They have played a huge number of gigs since settling in, close to 25 in February alone, and are getting fully immersed in the local scene.

But back in the beginning, four years after starting the band, the members of RAM made their initial appearance at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Visa and immigration problems caused the musicians to arrive late, but when they got to the hotel, culture shock set in.

It was the first time most of the musicians had ever left the island and most everything in New Orleans left them perplexed. Morse ordered pizza—they had never even heard of it, never mind eaten it. He laughed at the memory, “We almost lost one musician who was trying to get on the escalator. He put one foot on, and his foot started to leave… it was quite a thrill.”

The 25th anniversary of the festival was in 1994, and a huge parade was scheduled throughout the downtown area with RAM included in the march along with the Prince of Wales Social Aid and Pleasure Club and a brass band featuring James Andrews and a pre-teen Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews. Morse described the scene, “We’re in the van, racing down the street, we can see the parade one block down and we finally parked and started doing our Rara thing (the music they are known for). Right when we got to the crowd, lo and behold, Jimmy Buffet and Ed Bradley were standing there.”

Once they got into the parade Morse said, “No one had heard this particular rhythm and the parade kind of stopped until people started grooving with us. This official came up with a badge and I thought ‘oh, they’re gonna throw us out of here.’ He says, ‘are you supposed to be in this parade,’ I said, ‘yeah,’ and he said, ‘well keep it moving, keep it moving!’”

Fast forward 19 years and RAM made their second appearance at the Fair Grounds. This time around, Jazz Fest producer and director Quint Davis and Buffet visited Morse and his ensemble at the Hotel Oloffson, the group’s home base, in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. Morse said, “Jimmy had the idea of doing a Katrina/Haiti earthquake kind of theme for the Jazz Fest and they ended up having eight Haitian bands.” This was six years after the federal levees failed and flooded New Orleans and just over a year after a devastating quake hit the island nation.

At the Jazz Fest, the Haitian Pavilion came to life. RAM was everywhere over the course of the entire festival. Morse remembered, “They set up a tent. There was drumming and ceremonial type stuff going on. Every once in a while, we did a Rara parade, we did interviews and talked about the relationship between the whole second line thing and the Rara thing.” There was even a replica of a voudou temple.

He paused for a second and then added, “I think that’s probably when I came up with the phrase, ‘Haiti and New Orleans are twin sisters separated at birth.’”

The “Rara thing” is the simplest of the many rhythms the band plays. Many of the beats, like the traditional songs they sing, were brought over by enslaved Africans during the Middle Passage. When asked about the lineage of the songs, he said, “not decades [old], centuries.”

Many are praise songs for the lwas, African deities, which are worshipped in the traditional religious practices of the Kongo and Dahomey peoples. According to Morse, at least 50 percent of the people living in Haiti at the time of independence were born in Africa.

The Rara horns the musicians play when the group parades off stage are central to the group’s sound. Morse said, “Originally the instruments were different size [lengths] of bamboo. So, each note derived from the largeness of the bamboo and the length of it. You [only] have one note and the octave. So, what that means is because no bamboo is the same size and length, you have an infinite scale coming out of Haiti.” He went on to add, “Since the scale is infinite, no two Rara bands have the same notes.”

The horns his band uses are now made of sheet metal. Morse explained, “So now, once the whole thing moved to Port-au-Prince [from the countryside], they started using tin roofing to make the horns.” He continued, “I’ve seen pictures coming out of Texas and Louisiana in the 1920s and ’30s of horns with the same shape. I don’t understand what the connection is. There’s a lot more we have to learn between New Orleans and Louisiana and Haiti.”

When asked what he was looking forward to about playing the Jazz Fest this year, Morse replied, “This is a simple question. I’m looking forward to going to Jazz Fest as a local band. We’ve been here since October. We’ve been playing all these clubs around here and we never really knew how New Orleans functioned. We never really lived that before.” O

Thursday May 4 at 5:30 p.m. Lagniappe Stage