Last year I was in Fes for its annual Festival of World Sacred Music, one of the best of its kind, bringing musicians and bands from across the globe.
Sean Sheehan
The word sacred in its title is a little misleading as the week-long event includes many artists that are not promoting any religious beliefs: the 2025 festival saw drummers from Burundi, classical music from Azerbaijan, griot-inspired performances from Mali, Gregorian chants from a Swiss ensemble and – a spectacular highpoint – the composer Jowee Omicil and his band performing their album “Spiritual healing: Bwa Kayiman freedom suite”.
Spiritual healing takes its inspiration from a night in Haiti in 1791 when a group of slaves came together for a vodou ceremony, a moment in history that led to the uprising that called for the rights enshrined in the French Revolution to be applied to the country’s colonial possession in the Caribbean.
The Jazz Times is verbally lavish in its praise of Jowee Omicil: “a jiggling otherworldly soundscape of organically tactile acoustic jazz, fx-affected sampladelica, skronky R&B, tribal grooves and blowsy wine bar blues”. Some of its vocabulary is new to me but the overall sense is spot on in drawing attention to Omicil’s virtuosic and diverse mix of influences and accents, from Africa to Haiti. His new album “sMiLes” is glorious testimony to his eclecticism.
Omicil, born and brought up in Montréal to Haitian parents, studied music in New York and developed his multi-instrumentalist, polyglot techniques there (in Fes, he first came on the stage loaded with two saxophones, a cornet and a bag of smaller instruments which were unknown to me). “sMiLes”, and its titular nod to Miles Davis, is a musical statement about what the Canadian-Haitian artist finds to be of enduring value: “Miles taught us to be fearless, to embrace imperfection, and to trust the moment… “sMiLes” continues that conversation – a celebration of freedom in its truest form”. Omicil plays saxophones, clarinets, flutes, pocket trumpet, Rhodes piano, adds his own voice to a number of tracks and there are contributions from vocalist Dominique Fils-Aimé, Moroccan singer Malika Zarra and trumpeter Ludovic Louis.
There are eleven tracks and a bonus piece and the free-ranging sounds travel across different musical landscapes, from the contemplative (the seventh track brings Sadao Watanabe to mind) to occasional vexation of spirit in the fourth and fifth tracks and with pauses on the piano that are not pretentious or contrived. The music grows and settles into a speculative grove that draws to a questioning conclusion in the final tracks – “Should I smile or should I cry?” he rightly asks.
Jowee Omicil will come on Febuary 28th to Hootananny Brixton in London: for further information and booking tickets, see here.
(Photographs provided and authorised for publication)
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