Boulpik

afrobeat

BOULPIK (Haiti) ‘Chèche lavi.’ Seek living. A two-word expression in Haitian Creole that sums up the phrase ‘Seeking ways of earning a living’ and suggests that a living is not something that comes easily, but a goal to be sought - as if you were on a quest for a lost prize or buried treasure. So Franckel Sifranc and his fellow musicians in Boulpik are seekers of life. Nothing particularly extraordinary has happened in their careers. In fact, their past is very like that of millions of other Haitians - except that they have a gift for music. Franckel’s story began around fifty years ago in La Grand Anse, the Republic of Haiti’s most remote region, far to the west. Thinking back to his childhood in the coastal village of Dame-Marie, he remembers the sounds of the ‘ti djaz’ (little jazz): acoustic bands of amateur musicians who were so called to distinguish them from the more prestigious ‘gwo djaz’ (big jazz) bands with their modern instruments and amplifiers. The ti djaz playing at provincial gatherings used rudimentary, often locally-made instruments: a six-string “Matamò” guitar (its name a reminder of the Trio Matamoros’s strong influence on the genre), a trè (a guitar of Cuban origin with three strings, sometimes doubled) or even a banjo. The instrumental line-up was completed by a three-string double bass or a maniboula (a plucked idiophone based on the Cuban marímbula) and percussion: a drum, maracas and scraping board or kaskayèt (claves)...