The Willerm Delisfort Group

"Without A Home" performance

"The Great Thing" interview excerpts

The Willerm Delisfort Group was the first act we saw at the 2014 Port-au-Prince International Jazz Festival.

What a great, new group! What a beautiful blending of instruments and voices! What a stirring, swinging, profound and moving melding of Haitian and Jazz musics!

The Willerm Delisfort Group's first-ever Festival appearance was on that Saturday night, January 18, 2014 at the Festival in Port-au-Prince.

Three of the group's sextet are Haitian-American--leader, pianist, and composer Willerm Delisfort, singer Sarah Elizabeth Charles, and bassist Jonathan Michel.

Marquise Hill on trumpet and Christopher McBride on alto saxophone and Anwar Marshall on drums complete the group.

Our first performance-and-interview pairing begins with Willerm Delisfort's composition "Without A Home".

We follow today with excerpts from an interview done on Sunday morning, January 19.

The title of this Part One of our interview with the WDG, "The Great Thing", quotes Sarah Elizabath Charles: "The great thing about this particular group that Will 's put together is that there's no ego. Everybody 's just about the music and making it better."

The very resourceful and creative videography in the interview was done by Aristide Phillips in New Orleans.

Performance-video comes from the Creative Studio team of Port-au-Prince. They also provided the footage of the Lionel Loue'ke' Trio at that we offered earlier.

Our second combination of performance-and-interview from the Willerm Delisfort Group in Port-au-Prince, presenting the Haitian folk-song "Wangol o" as arranged by Sarah Elizabeth Charles and Willerm's observation "Haiti Has a Huge Impact on the World", will soon follow.

Thanks again to the Port-au-Prince International Jazz Festival and to New Orleans' community radio-station WWOZ.

We hope you enjoy the Willerm Delisfort Group as much as we do!

Maryse Dejean and Don Paul, March 24, 2014