Accolade De New York an Unforgettable Compas Band

Updated December 31, 2012 7:12 PM

Accolade de New York is a compas band that changed its group line-up from album to album, with a many as 12 group members and as few as six. Their first album La Foi, released in 1980, showed a cover photo of eleven priestly figures with large, white crucifixes superimposed on their religious garments. It made record buyers sit up and take notice. What were they all about?

On this debut LP, they added chants to the typical compas instrument mix. On tracks you hear alto and tenor saxes, trombone, guitar and bass guitar, congas, bongos, and other percussion instruments. Accolade de New York recorded eight releases over the 18 years they were together, using the LP format for all except their last release Koze Kredi, which they released as a CD in 1997.

Leader Jean-Robert Damas, who played alto sax, founded the group in 1979 and negotiated record contracts with many labels over their years together as a group. They included big label mavericks, among them Macaya, Mini Records, Marc Records, and St. Aude Records. Their distributor list is just as varied with Michigan Records, St. Aude, and Maxisound Productions, who handled their releases.

Arriving on the music scene a decade after the mini-jazz movement, they were influenced by this sound, which grew out of rising young compas bands in Pétionville in the mid- to late sixties. Accolade de New York embraced the compas, racine, and mini-jazz music genres and made them their own, not easy to do in the competitive recording industry in Haiti.

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