You can celebrate Mardi Gras from your couch tonight with WXPN’s new ‘Kanaval’

Leyla McCalla grew up in New Jersey as the daughter of Haitian immigrants and human rights activists, but it wasn’t until the cellist and songwriter moved to New Orleans that she fully understood her musical heritage.

“That was my biggest discovery moving here,” says the singer, who narrates Kanaval: Haitian Rhythms and the Music of New Orleans, the new National Public Radio documentary produced by University of Pennsylvania radio station WXPN-FM (88.5).

The show premiered early this monthand will air again at 8 p.m. tonight on XPN and its regional sister stations, and on XPN.org.

Kanaval, which features two hours of cultural history followed by an ebullient, hour-long music mix, kicks off a year’s worth of XPN programming devoted to Haitian and New Orleans music and culture.

Pandemic permitting, it will include a COVID-19-delayed Mardi Gras-style ball in November with bands from Haiti and New Orleans, as well as Breaking the Thermometer to Hide the Fever, a theatrical production that McCalla created and stars in. She premiered the work at Duke University last March and plans to reprise it here in May, but that timing is seeming unlikely given the current course of the pandemic.

The website xpnkanaval.org is already filled with playlists interweaving Haitian and New Orleans music, and short films about the Haitian community in Philadelphia will be added throughout the year.

When McCalla moved to the Crescent City in 2011, it wasn’t only because she felt called by the Afro-Caribbean rhythmic pulse of the music of southern Louisiana.

Her motivation was also practical. “I knew I could make money busking on the street,” she says, talking from her home in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward.

Playing for tips in the French Quarter, McCalla, who’s a member of the feminist folk quartet Our Native Daughters, “started putting the pieces together” about the history of Haitian culture in New Orleans, learning from sources such as cultural historian Ned Sublette’s The World That Made New Orleans.

Sublette’s book tells how Creole culture in New Orleans was shaped in 1809 by a multiracial exodus of 10,000 Haitians following the Haitian Revolution, including free Black and enslaved persons. Their arrival doubled the city’s population.

“It’s this amazing story that’s informative about the music, and a compelling Black history of the United States,” says Roger LaMay, the XPN general manager who executive produced Kanaval with Bruce Warren, assistant general manager for programming.

And yet, says McCalla, when New Orleans culture is discussed, Cuban influence is often stressed more than Haitian. “To me, it’s an anti-Blackness,” McCalla says. “It’s the result of living in a white supremacist society. Haiti is an undeniably Black place.”

“That Haitian connection wasn’t being talked about when I first moved here,” she says. “I’m happy that’s more of a conversation that’s happening now.”

That’s due in part to Krewe du Kanaval, the New Orleans parading organization founded by Haitian Canadian violinist Régine Chassagne of Arcade Fire and her husband, Win Butler, along with Ben Jaffe, the leader of New Orleans’ Preservation Hall Jazz Band. All three are featured in the Kanaval documentary, talking about their efforts to call attention to Haiti’s powerful impact on New Orleans culture.

The trio took a trip to Haiti in 2015 that “changed everything for me, and my band, in the most beautiful way,” says Jaffe, a tuba player like his father Allan, a Pottsville native and Penn grad who got religion about New Orleans jazz and founded Preservation Hall in 1961.

After Jaffe’s trip to Port-au-Prince with Butler and Chassagne, the trio formed Krew du Kanaval, which debuted in 2018. An XPN crew that included the documentary’s chief writer and producer Alex Lewis headed to NOLA in February 2020 to chronicle the celebration for the show.

“It was one of the last things we did before COVID,” says LaMay.

Kanaval — which was funded by $300,000 from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, among other grants — is part of XPN’s fourth roots music initiative, beginning with the Mississippi Blues Project in 2012.

That was followed by a Zydeco Crossroads initiative in 2014 and the Gospel Roots of Rock and Soul project in 2018, which included a nationally distributed radio documentary, The Gospel Roots of Rock and Soul. It was nominated for a prestigious Peabody Award and won a regional Edward R. Murrow award. It will be rebroadcast on XPN on Feb. 25 at 8 p.m.

» READ MORE: WXPN to mount year-spanning 'Gospel Roots of Rock and Soul' project

“The idea was to do yearlong deep dives exploring the roots of the music we played,” LaMay said. “We were interested in how these regional music styles of American music we identify with particular parts of the country have a wider impact. And we wanted to bring the music to Philadelphia.”

The XPN listening audience is largely white, LaMay acknowledges, but the station’s regional music initiatives have focused on Black music genres, in part to connect with a broader audience.

“We’ve been a little more intentional about that each time,” LaMay said. “The gospel series attracted a significant Black audience to the events.”

Pre-COVID-19, the Kanaval plan was to kick off the yearlong series this month with the now-postponed Mardi Gras ball, at the Fillmore with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band plus Haitian bands RAM and Boukman Eksperyans.

LaMay said he hopes the new November time frame is realistic. The station’s Xponential Music Fest, which has moved to September this year, will also have a Kanaval component, if concerts are back on schedule.

Jaffe has reinvigorated Preservation Hall into an adventurous polyrhythmic ensemble on albums like 2019′s A Tuba To Cuba. For him, the Kanaval initiative and documentary offer an opportunity to dig deep into his city’s rich culture.

“The city is often times celebrated for what I call the four B’s,” he says. “Bourbon Street, beads, boobs, and beer. We’re trying to celebrate New Orleans in ways that get beyond that, that get to a higher ground and a higher state of being.”

Likewise, McCalla says she’s “determined to speak about Haiti in a more nuanced and beautiful way, and I am thrilled that this documentary is coming out. You know, it’s one thing to say Black Lives Matter. It’s another to actually understand the history.”

“I’m a combination of Haiti and the United States, and I’m always trying to understand that,” she says. “I go deeper into the well, and then the well gets deeper.”