Overview:
Celebrate Brooklyn launched its 2025 season with a showcase of three Haitian female singers—Riva Precil, Talie Cerin and Mélissa Laveaux—whose performances highlighted Haitian spirituality, diaspora experiences and cultural resilience through music.
Celebrate Brooklyn opened its 2025 season at the Prospect Park Bandshell on Friday, June 13, with a dynamic performance by three Haitian women artists – Talie Cerin, Mélissa Laveaux and Riva Precil – whose music wove together the spiritual, cultural and diasporic threads of Haitian identity and traditions.
Each artist brought her own distinct style and message, addressing issues affecting the Haitian community in distinctly different ways.
Precil opened the evening with a meditative performance, beginning with a singing bowl and accompanied by Okai on the conch shell. Each song in her set was rooted in Haitian spirituality, dedicated to different lwa (deities), as she explained to the audience. The opening numbers were intended to open the gates between our realm and the spirit realm, and represent a blend of tradition steered by her contemporary vision.
The band anchored her soaring Vodou-inspired melodies with a complex tapestry of sounds, with the rhythms beat out by Okai on the tambou at the center.
Dancers Marx Frantz Dessources and Woodly Jaboin entered and exited, moving to Okai’s rhythms. Lamarre Junior on bass and Dave on drums—both members of Lakou Mizik—punctuated the performance with cymbal flourishes, while Kiki, a newcomer to the Brooklyn scene, added a roots-rock edge with hard-hitting guitar work.
“It’s an honor to be a part of an all-woman Haitian lineup,” Precil said to The Haitian Times before the show, adding that given the current situation, she’s attempting to “stay on a higher vibration and radiate love to friends and family who are going through it right now and facing challenges.”
Highlights included “Grann Bwa,” dedicated to the forest spirit, and “Simbi,” an irresistible groove from Enkantasyon. Precil’s set also featured “Mpral Fè maji a mache,” a sensual konpa track about a love spell; “Twa Fèy,” a twoubadou-style song she recorded with her band Bohio Music; and “Se Bon,” performed over an ibo rhythm. She closed with a high-energy rara that crescendoed to a powerful finish, Lamarre’s bass evoking the blaring vaksin horns typical of Haitian street processions.
Precil, who is well known to audiences in the tight-knit local music scene in Brooklyn, released her fourth solo album, Enkantasyon, in March. She will next perform at BAYO at Barclays Center on June 28.
Talie Cerin brings meditative storytelling
Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter Cerin followed with a deeply intimate and prayerful set. “Let’s take a deep breath together,” she said at the start. “All of these songs are prayers.”
Standing motionless in the light, she eased into her set with the soothing “Solèy Midi”, the title song of her debut album, enveloping the audience in a tranquil atmosphere. The meditative approach drew the audience’s focus to her extraordinary vocals. Spare arrangements and slow tempos let her voice shine, enchanting listeners throughout her set.
Accompanied by Marcus Lolo on keys, Fernando Saci on percussion, Eric Blesunas on bass, Mervin Toussaint on sax and flute, and vocalist Stephanie Rose, Cerin’s voice stood out in its quiet command. Her sister, videographer Mélodie Cerin, created visuals projected above the stage, reinforcing the themes of migration, memory and identity.
“Right now, it’s a precarious time for Haitians,” Cerin told The Haitian Times ahead of her performance. “My music is for everyone, but I primarily sing for Haitians. Right now, we find ourselves in a place where home has become too dangerous for a lot of us to stay, and has caused us to flee to places where we are also not welcome.
“So what do we have?” said Cerin, who relocated to Philadelphia after leaving Haiti. “At the end of the day, all the music that I sing is about creating a hopeful vision for the future, for Haitians and Haiti and all marginalized people.”
Her music draws on her Haitian heritage as well as the music of her adopted community.
“It’s my way of making sense of the world,” she said to The Haitian Times, and her way of giving back to the two communities where she is at home. Cerin is connecting the dots in her music, finding common ground in the culture by seamlessly blending twoubadou, Haitian folk music, Philly soul, and Jazz.
Her current project, Miwa, is a multimedia song cycle premiering in November in Philadelphia’s Icebox Project Space. The performance will feature orchestral arrangements, video, and vocals by both Cerin and Stephanie Rose. The narrative follows eight women—four Haitian and four Haitian-American—exploring the continuity and transformation of tradition in migration.
Mélissa Laveaux closes with rhythmic fire
Laveaux, a Haitian-Canadian artist, closed the evening with her indie-rock interpretations of Haitian folklore and history. Performing with a bass, guitar and drum kit, her set pulsed with rhythm and resistance, transcending any language barriers for those who couldn’t understand the Haitian Creole lyrics.
Over the course of the evening, all three artists played their own interpretations of traditional Haitian folk songs like Kouzen” and “Se Bon.”
Chriss Rimpel, a longtime promoter of Haitian music who helped bring Cerin and Precil to larger stages, emphasized the evening’s cultural significance.
“An all-Haitian women lineup opening a major festival in Brooklyn is an honor,” she told The Haitian Times. “[Especially], when Haiti is going through a lot right now, it’s uplifting to celebrate Haiti.”
The evening’s significance resonated not just with the performers, but with the wider Haitian community.
“I’m really excited to bring this to a wider audience,” Cerin said. “All three of us do very different kinds of Haitian music, three very specific flavors of Haitian culture that all tell the same love and is very indicitive of New York, a hub for Haitian culture.
“Haitian culture has all these new iterations, and the three of us are emblematic of that.”
BRIC Chief Programming Director Deron Johnston stated in his introduction: “I would like to thank all of the artists that create that space for connection and joy and communication getting us through challenging times. this show is absolutely a representation of that.”