Biography
Three Centuries of History, One Cello
Born Leyla Sarah McCalla on October 3, 1985, in Queens, New York City, to Haitian immigrant parents, she grew up steeped in the Haitian struggle for justice: her father, Jocelyn McCalla, led the New York-based National Coalition for Haitian Rights, and her mother, Régine Dupuy, is the daughter of Ben Dupuy, founder of the Haitian socialist newspaper Haïti Progrès. Raised in Maplewood, New Jersey, she spent two teenage years in Accra, Ghana, then studied cello performance and chamber music at New York University after a year at Smith College.
In 2010 she moved to New Orleans and honed her craft busking with her cello on the streets of the French Quarter, falling in love with Louisiana Creole culture — particularly the fiddle styles of Canray Fontenot and Bébé Carrière, which she began exploring on the cello. While playing on the street she met Tim Duffy of the Music Maker Relief Foundation, who introduced her to the Grammy-winning Black string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops. She toured as their cellist from 2011 to 2013 and appeared on their 2012 album Leaving Eden.
"Her voice is disarmingly natural, and her settings are elegantly succinct."
— The New York Times, on Vari-Colored Songs
Her debut solo album, Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes — settings of Hughes's poetry alongside Haitian folk songs and originals — appeared in Europe in 2013 and internationally in 2014, and was named Album of the Year by both the London Sunday Times and Songlines magazine. A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey followed in 2016, featuring Marc Ribot, Rhiannon Giddens, Louis Michot of the Lost Bayou Ramblers, and Sarah Quintana. Capitalist Blues (2019) was her first full-band record, and that same year she joined Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, and Allison Russell in the supergroup Our Native Daughters for Songs of Our Native Daughters on Smithsonian Folkways.
"Songwriting is a modality to tell the stories that need to be told. Sometimes these are painful stories to tell."
— Leyla McCalla
Breaking the Thermometer (2022, ANTI-) — the companion to a multidisciplinary theater work commissioned by Duke Performances about Radio Haiti, the first station to broadcast in Haitian Kreyòl — was named one of the year's best albums by The Guardian, Variety, Mojo, and NPR Music, and earned her Folk Alliance International's 2022 People's Voice Award. Sun Without the Heat (2024, ANTI-), her fifth studio album, draws on Afrobeat, Ethiopian modalities, Brazilian Tropicalismo, and American folk and blues. She lives in New Orleans with her husband, musician Daniel Tremblay, and their children — and her younger sister, Sabine McCalla, is also a New Orleans musician.
