Haiti's ball of fire: rooted in rhythms of the northern countryside, this nation's oldest big band is threatened by the invasion of foreign music and a failing economy.

• Author: Regan, Jane

Past the seamstresses in the downtown parlor of the brightly painted colonial-style row house, up the creaky wooden stairs, one of Haiti's national treasures is bent over an empty page of sheet music.

Today the girl gets up, she's counting the raindrops that fall from the sky. My friends, she's crazy! Oh help, crazy people are in charge in the country, You should see how that girl is worked up ...

One hand on a tape player, the other clutching a worn Number 2 pencil, he pushes play and stop, play and stop, listening to the trumpets, the saxophones, the singer. Composed in 1982, the tune was a "greatest hit." But the sheet music for it, carefully written out in the composer's own hand, has disappeared.

"We were on tour in New York," the man says without looking up. "We showed up at the club where we had left the rented instruments and our music the night before. It was all gone."

So now, when Haiti's oldest big band wants to resurrect a hit like "La Folie" (Craziness), someone has to copy out the parts. And when it comes to copying parts, nobody does it better than seventy-five-year-old Hulric Pierre-Louis, one of the seven young men who founded Septentrional over half a century ago.

"I wanted us to have our own orchestra. My dream was for musicians to be respected," says Pierre-Louis, known universally as "the Maestro."

The Caribbean sunlight is streaming through the gauze curtains and into his white hair. Below on the streets, the used-glass man clang-clang-clangs on an empty bottle to let people know he is passing. The vegetable lady, giant overflowing basket balanced on her head, calls out her wares. Strains from a church choir rehearsal float on the breeze and clash with the raspy Haitian rapper's tune the pirated cassette seller is advertising, blasting beyond recognition on a cheap boom box.

Despite the rhythms and music everywhere in Haitian life, a musical career was not considered honorable when Pierre-Louis was growing up in the northern port town of Cap-Haitien in the 1930s. His father had hint studying to be a tailor. But then the young Pierre-Louis was suddenly an orphan, on his own. He quit school, his only hope a gift for the guitar.

After playing in a few groups and teaching himself flute and saxophone, in 1948 his trio and a quartet merged to found a group they named after their hometown. "Septentrional" means "northern" in French (as well as in English and Spanish).

Fifty-five years later, the twenty-piece orchestra plays hundreds of gigs across Haiti and travels to the U.S. and even Europe almost every year. They have over 350 original songs and 42 records or CDs to their name. And they own the Feu Vert (Green Light) nightclub mid movie theater, a big accomplishment for a Haitian band, most of whom struggle to survive.

Septentrional has practically defied gravity. In a country where political parties split more often than seize power and the National Palace has changed hands fifty-three times in less than two hundred years, Septentrional is still intact. They have played together for fifty-five years, six years longer than the average Haitian lives, making music through dictatorships, democratic interludes, coup d'etats, and chaos.

"It's a major thing," Pierre-Louis agrees as he travels to a New York gig during the group's fifty-Fifth anniversary tour in the U.S. "With all the problems in our country, if we can reach fifty-five, that's a big deal."

I'm a farmer I live in the plains. I don't know anything about people who wear fancy suits and ties. I work the land. I know the trees. I watch for the new moon so I know it's time to plant ... --"Farmer," 1962

"I remember when we didn't even have instruments," Pierre-Louis muses. "I used to rent a saxophone for five gourdes [US$1 at the time]. Rather than turning it in after a concert I'd hide with it for a couple of days so I could practice."

The group lacked a repertoire, too, so Pierre-Louis and other members would gather every day at a barbershop on 12th Street where an old Phillips tube radio in the corner relayed Dominican and Cuban music shows. They copied out what they heard or wrote new pieces based on what they could remember.

Cuban and Dominican music--sons, meringues, boleros--was popular in Haiti, but when Septentrional was founded in 1948, there was also a strong Haitian current. The country was only a dozen years out of the first U.S. occupation (1915-34), a brutal and profoundly disturbing experience for many Haitians who were brought face-to-face with racism and a terrifying levied labor system. When Marines rounded up and forced farmers to work on road-building crews, people were reminded of the slavery their ancestors had defeated only a century or so earlier.

In the country-side, Haitians fought back in what is known as the Caco War. Somewhere between thirty-five hundred and fifteen thousand Haitians were gunned down or died in prisons or concentration camps before the conflict was over. In the cities, intellectuals and students...