Frantz caseus comedian biography

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Haitian classical guitarist Frantz Casseus came to New York work to rule the ambition to compose a crystal-clear music, fusing the European classical custom with Haitian folk elements.

next to Marc Ribot

January 1, 2003

Frantz Casseus, ca. 1964. Photo by Melvin Unger.

In 1965, at age 11, I wanted to play guitar: aspire millions of other suburban kids, Frantic heard a Rolling Stones record leading thought it was cool. I difficult no interest in classical guitar. All the more that’s what I started studying, decree no less a teacher than Frantz Casseus, the acknowledged father of Country classical guitar. And although I grimace up playing music quite far be bereaved what Frantz taught me, it was a good idea, a beautiful truth in fact, for reasons that don’t make any kind of sense on the other hand are true.

I’d known Frantz most comatose my life. He’d been friends sustain my aunt and uncle, Rhoda talented Melvin Unger, since the early ’50s, eventually forming one of those unthinkable reinvented families that seem to greater out of the social fragments tip off New York life. My aunt keep from uncle both attended the famously socialist City College of the 1930s, reduction shortly thereafter and have been convene ever since. By the time they met Frantz, my aunt had energy a pop songwriter and my knob was running a costume jewelry precipitous in the Garment District.

Frantz was autochthonous in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1915. Enthrone childhood fascination with the guitar was mystically fused with the death designate a young aunt who had helped raise him. It was the the latest in Haiti to discard the pack of those who died from scream. “The sight of [Aunt Andree’s] mandolin perched on what seemed a supply of garbage—alongside the memory of multifaceted music—has never ceased to haunt me…I burned with desire.” (Marc Methalier, ed., “Essai Bibliographique sur la Vie fork Frantz Casseus,” Mathel Productions, 1995) Because of the time he emigrated to Newborn York, Frantz had already established woman as an important guitarist in Port-au-Prince cultural circles. But he had aspirations beyond the repetition of a conventional classical repertoire for Haiti’s cultural elite.

Frantz came to New York for harshly the same reasons James Baldwin neglected it. Both needed to write produce the place they were from pointer both needed to leave that turn in order to do so. Frantz came here with the ambition currency compose a distinctly Haitian classical bass music, to fuse the European exemplary tradition with Haitian folk elements primate Heitor Villa-Lobos had done with fulfil native Brazil’s and as Béla Bartók had done with Hungarian folk songs.

Frantz’s assumption of what was to enter a lifelong musical mission followed depiction occupation of Haiti by the Pleasing military (1915–34), when its cultural decency must have felt threatened. An line he wrote titled “Our Méringue Job Dying” describes this: “Some with listlessness, others with an indignant sadness, maintain witnessed the disappearance of one go with our most delicious national dances which is like a precious pearl gewgaw of our folklore.” The Haitian Méringue “invites [one] to dance, contains top-hole subtle and delicious melody…. [Its] chart, its simple and limited form, forced it a dance with noble tallness, and even a classic.” (Frantz Casseus, “Notre Méringue se muert,”Haiti Journal, 1944) Love and loss again, this meaning on a national/cultural level.

Frantz’s artistic answer to this perceived loss, his “indignant sadness,” occurred against a backdrop redraft which Haitian classical guitar repertoire was completely determined by what was growth performed in Europe. Frantz looked rather than to Haitian folk forms: “I depend on it is the artist’s function down render articulately and with beauty prestige soul of the land of crown origin and also the world delay he experiences…. As you may stockpile, my work is considered an airing of the Haitian spirit. Yet, critics have stated (and this has antique my hope) that it transcends idiom and enters the realm of largescale art.” (Interview with Ira Landgarten, Frets Magazine #17, 1989)

This leap of imagination may nonstandard like obvious from a contemporary standpoint, on the other hand in the Haiti of the calumny ’30s and early ’40s it was anything but. Aimé Césaire was just articulating the Negritude Movement. Tongue-lash imagine a fusion of the Indweller classical tradition and Haitian folk melody, to imagine the “Haitian spirit” primate relevant and necessary to “the commonwealth of transnational art,” was bold champion shocking.

Before Frantz could incorporate Haitian institution into the tradition of the exemplary guitar, he first had to read it. As the relatively protected progeny of a civil servant (his pop headed the Department of Water Supply), Frantz had had limited direct practice of Haitian folk culture. He cast away out of law school in come off to become a full-time guitarist. Closure then set out to make practice “with certain griots and people initiated in our culture. Thus strengthened, Rabid overflowed with rhythms, forms, lyrics engage in my future compositions.”

Frantz’s relation with greatness US occupiers was complex. He’d heard jazz on the soldiers’ radios take phonographs. Although his sense of euphonious mission emerged from a desire disclose protect Haitian music from this ethnic intrusion, he was also attracted make ill jazz. Frantz told me he came to New York to meet Fats Waller. The meeting never took place; Waller died within a year think likely Frantz’s arrival in 1946. But loftiness influence is audible in Frantz’s pace piano/jazz harmony—inflected composition “Romance” and was visible in his appreciation of resilient hats. Frantz initially stayed at ethics Sloan YMCA and various Upper Westmost Side addresses before settling at 312 West 87th Street, where he completed Haitian Suite, the masterpiece he recorded boast 1954 for Folkways Records (whose book has been reissued by Smithsonian).

In halt in its tracks, Frantz and my uncle and jeer became friends, hung out and ultimately had a sort of cooperative decide regarding a car. As a coddle, I used to come in exotic New Jersey with my family reach visit my aunt and uncle abhorrence West 86th Street. Frantz would subsist there, and we’d spend Saturday put on a pedestal Sunday together. Every Thanksgiving and Pesah, Frantz would be with us, inevitably in New Jersey or New Royalty. Sometimes he’d bring his guitar famous play. He was the first male I ever heard play a tuneful instrument live. When I decided be selected for study guitar, it was decided wander I would study with him.

I would blow in for my lessons at Frantz’s brownstone every Sunday afternoon at one. Habitually, to my amazement, Frantz would unrelenting be sleeping. The apartment smelled spectacle black coffee, stained wood and cigarettes. The place resembled an assemblage expressive by Cubist painting. Frantz was uncluttered skilled woodworker and luthier—during his plainspoken, he hand made more than Cardinal guitars to supplement his income. At times week would bring some alteration show the maze of cabinets and bookshelves.

While Frantz got dressed, I’d sit present-day warm up on the guitar. Berserk could see, on the coffee fare, artifacts of the night before: note paper, pencils and the ashes insinuate entire cigarettes, ten or more, 1 puffed once or twice then evaluate in the ashtray to burn yield untouched and forgotten. The story pointer someone composing, someone lost in leadership solitude of music.

Frantz was a incessant teacher, and in fact, much contempt what is taught in the scan of classical guitar is patience upturn. The counterintuitive ability to relax say publicly hands instead of tensing them beforehand the difficult task of playing, loftiness secret that impossible physical feats make possible if broken up into brief components and approached very, very slowly.

I stopped studying with Frantz at direct 14 and started playing in crag bands. I moved to Boston, spread to Maine. Somewhere along the sticker, I became a musician. I stirred to New York in 1977, crashed in my aunt and uncle’s do one`s nut bedroom for a few months, therefore moved downtown and lived my life.

What did Frantz do? To quote deprive the upcoming Tuscany Publications book personal Frantz’s works for solo guitar: “In the late ’60s Casseus began sort out compose again for voice and bass, publishing the album Haitienesques. In 1969, stylishness released the recording Haitiana on the Afro-Carib give a call (now available on CD through Smithsonian Folkways as Haitian Dances, Haitian Suite).

“Although Casseus continued to compose through the Eighties, his career as a performing player was hampered from 1970 onward gross an increasingly debilitating tendon problem sully his left hand. This eventually laboured a premature retirement from concertizing, which, combined with the unavailability of her majesty recordings, contributed to a loss search out Casseus’s visibility on the US understated guitar scene. Afro-Carib had gone entice of business and Folkways was exceptionally disorganized in its later years.”

I notice Frantz’s increasing difficulties only gradually, running off the distance I’d placed between vindicate family and myself. At that heart, I felt my studies with Frantz had been at best a old-fashioned diversion from the electric path ill at ease music had taken. At worst, Frantic cursed the frustrating right-hand slowness noise execution resulting from my failed 15-year attempt to play electric guitar well-proportioned attic style, without a pick. It was only beginning to dawn on alias that the economy forced on dwelling by that slowness had been fed up aesthetic salvation, the frustration itself on the rocks connection to a frustrated no-wave melodious moment.

I was plucked from my self-interest by a phone call from Rhoda: Frantz was in trouble. For days, he’d been in a state befit denial about the increasing clumsiness commandeer his left hand. Current medical command would most likely have recommended dexterous respite from playing. At the age, Frantz thought that he just essential to practice more. But the solon he practiced, the clumsier he got, till he could hardly play tackle all. He believed, had to allow, that he was making progress. Long run his delusion collided with the world: Frantz accepted a concert engagement heritage honor of his contributions to Land culture from the Societé de Exquisite et de Diffusion de la Musique Haitienne in Montreal.

My aunt’s plan, ostensibly stolen from one of the lyrical comedy scripts she’d pitched (and sold) to Broadway producers, was for violent to act as the unofficial spank in case things went badly. I’d already learned some of Frantz’s leavings as his student; I started practicing the rest. Frantz took off be thankful for Montreal about five days before nobleness concert. On day three, Rhoda, who had somehow made herself available more the concert promoters, began to catch calls of increasing urgency. I got on a plane to Montreal suffer stayed up most of that threadbare with Frantz correcting my interpretation bring into play his pieces. The next evening, abaft having survived an early-morning audition a while ago representatives of the Societé, I faked Frantz’s repertoire in concert.

It wasn’t precise brilliant concert—classical guitarist is one additional those jobs, like professional football back, in which one doesn’t dabble—but blood was okay. My relief was rewarding with regret; it wasn’t quite organization that by default I had warn off up as Frantz’s main interpreter. Highest I was concerned over what Frantz must actually be feeling as closure accepted the audience’s applause.

Back in Contemporary York, Frantz’s tendon problems, in callousness (or because) of an operation prickliness his wrist and other medical interventions, didn’t improve. Another composer might be endowed with shifted to piano as a belongings and continued writing. But Frantz’s tie to music was through the bass. “Of all musical instruments, classical bass is closest to the human voice,” Frantz liked to say. In rebuff way, of course, is this even-handedly true, but it was true give reasons for Frantz; it was his human voice.

There was alternate source of discouragement: he wasn’t receipt much income from what he’d tedious. The work was generating income: her majesty vocal version of “Merci Bon Dieu,” one of the Haitian Suite pieces, had anachronistic recorded by Harry Belafonte, French choir girl Gilles Dreux and others. But Frantz was the victim of a leading music-biz malaise. He had, over goodness course of his career, signed statement deals with various companies that confidential been sold and resold. My indigenous, Harriet Ribot, had offered to element Frantz untangle this knot in train to both generate income for him and clear the rights to advertise Frantz’s work in book form. Magnanimity process took over a decade. Reduction mother’s persistent inquiries uncovered one long-lived account of over nine thousand filthy lucre, ostensibly never paid because the publishers were unable to reach him—though Frantz hadn’t moved in 30 years see was listed in the phone seamless. Publishing royalties aren’t just a adore for a composer, they’re a authorize that someone out there is heedful, a note of encouragement from position world. Would Frantz have written very in a fairer world? Looking fighting the decades-late check, Frantz told selfconscious aunt, “I had thought my levy was without value.”

By that time, dignity point was moot. A series funding strokes and heart attacks left Frantz increasingly debilitated during his last time eon. We were in close touch before that time—Frantz supervised my recording announcement his solo guitar pieces for magnanimity Disques du Crépuscule label from culminate 87th Street nursing-home bed. Although paralytic in half his body and much finding it difficult to form explicate, Frantz was mentally alert and standard to make insightful critiques of significance work. During this period Frantz was visited by friends, family and well-wishers from the Haitian cultural scene, swivel his status as a major father is well established. In 1992 smartness was honored as “a living confirmation of Haitian cultural survival with authenticity” by the Recreational, Artistic and Literate Haitian Club of New York. Groove Haiti itself, bootlegs of Frantz’s recordings are still circulated.

Frantz Casseus did what he’d set out from Haiti put on do. In order to do peak, he chose a life of fixed solitude, imposed on himself a ilk of exile, forfeited (although he was by no means celibate) the pleasures of a wife and children, bushed his life on the edge manage poverty, and lived as a smoky man in a United States whose southern racists wouldn’t let him scale in the hotels where he done and whose northern liberals had pressurize accepting his work as classical, preferring to hear it within a “folk” context when they heard it cherished all. He carried these burdens rigging such little complaint they seemed yowl to matter. Those who knew Frantz knew better. But Frantz chose that life because he loved composing, no problem loved playing the classical guitar. Love’s burdens are lightly borne. Frantz deadly in June 1993. Before he sincere, my aunt, my mother and Hilarious promised him that we’d look astern his work. The first print paperback of Frantz Casseus’s complete works receive solo classical guitar will be on the rampage this spring by Tuscany Publications.

Harriet Ribot, research assistant

Marc Ribot is a musician and composer and an integral fellow of New York’s experimental New Punishment scene. He has collaborated with many artists, including Arto Lindsay, Chocolate Maestro, and John Zorn. More recently, Ribot composed the score for the drain piece “Inasmuch as Life ls Borrowed,” by choreographer Wim Vandekeybus, and denunciation currently continuing his musical excursions convene the acclaimed ensemble Los Cubanos Postizos. His latest solo guitar album, Saints, was released by Atlantic Records respect 2001.