“This record, in many ways, saved my life.” As Nathalie Joachim candidly explained to a rapt audience at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Playhouse on Thursday night, her music deals with deeply personal experiences of grief and the continuing trauma of the violence endured by her ancestors. But it is also a collective utterance, an effort to nurture community in the present through a confrontation with the past.
The Haitian American artist was presenting her latest album, Ki moun ou ye (Who are you?), for Cal Performances, marking the performer’s first headlining appearance on the West Coast. In an evening that was by turns uplifting and disquieting, celebratory and somber, Joachim’s music communicated the powerful idea that whatever our personal troubles, nobody should have to suffer in silence.
Ki moun ou ye is Joachim’s second solo album; it comes after the Grammy-nominated Fanm d’Ayiti (Women of Haiti), which marked the beginning of her ongoing effort to acknowledge and deal with her Haitian roots in her music. Joachim’s family still owns a farm in southern Haiti, where she wrote much of the music on this record. An adroit multi-instrumentalist who sings, plays the flute, controls electronics, and composes, Joachim emerges from the world of contemporary classical music — she was the flutist of the Chicago-based ensemble Eighth Blackbird from 2015 to 2019. Her solo albums mark her debut as a singer — literally giving voice to an experience that has been silenced — but also reveal a virtuosic musical agility that may be unmatched among her peers.
In today’s interconnected and eclectic culture, it has become a cliche to praise a musician for crossing the boundaries of genre and style. But Joachim does this easily, and Thursday’s crowd was more diverse than usual, including many Haitian Americans who responded enthusiastically to Joachim’s frequent quips in Kreyòl.
Rather than saying that she resists the constraints of genre, it might be more accurate to say that Joachim operates with total indifference to them. On vocals, flute, and electronics, she gave a live rendition of the album in its entirety (although the songs were in a different order), with the help of an all-star band: violinist Yvonne Lam, violist Cameren Anai Williams, flutist Izzy Lepanto Gleicher, and percussionist Daniel Villarreal-Carrillo. Joachim’s manner of vocal expression is direct, ethereal, and folk-like. But although Ki moun ou ye, with its discrete but interconnected songs, at times resembles a concept album, a song cycle, or an operatic monodrama, it can’t be reduced to any of these categories. The diverse influences combine to produce something wholly original.
It is telling that the album’s title track is in the form of a question: “Who are you?” There is a searching quality to this music, which became apparent from the concert’s first song, “Kenbe m” (Hold me). The lyrics, in both Kreyòl and English, invoke the “unsettled” feeling of searching for a distant home. Joachim hums before she sings on this song; gently rocking consonant harmonies strum in the ensemble, almost like an improvised soundscape of nature, flowing in sympathy without an overriding structural formula.
The second song, “Kouti yo” (The stitches), increased the momentum, introducing a delicately articulated pulse accentuated with occasional deep bass thuds. But it wasn’t until the third song, “Renmen m plis” (Love me more), that we got a decisive groove from Villarreal-Carrillo on the drum set. Notably, the instruments in the ensemble are all treble-heavy; any lower frequencies have to come from the drums and the electronics. Joachim’s finely calibrated orchestration resembles the timbral terrain of her main instrument, the flute — sharp and penetrating in the upper registers, breathy and transparent in the lower ones. This is a refreshing example of Joachim’s musical agility; the music glides and shimmers effervescently, seductively, mischievously avoiding any sense of definitive closure.
Joachim’s lyrics also live in this questioning, groping space. They deal with serious themes — the texts are shot through with violent imagery of wounds and knives, and one song is a frank meditation on the ability of language to both degrade Black people and to provide a source of refuge. But most of the lyrics are nonspecific — “What I feel in my body I want to release / What I’m hiding in every corner I don’t want to see.” Their only direct tie to the Haitian context is that they are in Kreyòl, a language indelibly tied to the Haitian experience.
It is clear that Joachim’s mission isn’t to educate her audience about her ancestors’ history but to use that history as an impetus to generate community in the present. Her conversational remarks between pieces made no reference to Haiti’s historical specificity: It is the first Black republic, established after a revolution (1791–1804) as important as the French one and crippled by a staggeringly large “independence debt” France imposed in exchange for recognizing the nation’s freedom. And just this week, it faces a catastrophic security crisis poised to topple the government.
Without addressing these topics directly, Joachim provided a space to reflect on them with her shimmering and poignant performance. As she said toward the end of her set, “There’s a lot of pain happening in Haiti right now that we’re all holding deep in our bodies and in our spirits, and that requires a perpetual healing. So hopefully some of these songs offer some kind of hope in that regard.” It will take more than songs to repair these wounds. But if music can indeed heal the psyche, there’s nobody better than Nathalie Joachim to take on the task.
