Leyla McCalla Breaking the Thermometer (CD)

(Anti Records) 15 tracks, digisleeve

There are more questions than answers on Leyla McCalla's remarkable new album Breaking The Thermometer. What does democracy look like? For whom does it work? How long can it last? On the surface, the album explores the legacy of Radio Haiti - Haiti's first radio station to broadcast the news in Haitian Kreyòl, the voice of the people - and the journalists who risked and lost their lives to broadcast for nearly 50 years. But on a more fundamental level, the collection is a deeply personal reckoning with memory and identity, with the role of artists, activists, and immigrants in modern society, and with the very notion of storytelling. In working on the project, McCalla found herself forced to confront her own experiences as a Haitian-American woman, unraveling layers of marginalization and generations of oppression and determination as she sought a clearer vision of herself and her purpose. The result is at once a work of radical performance art, historical scholarship, and personal memoir, a sweeping and powerful meditation on family, democracy, and free expression that could not have come at a better time.