Tabou Cambo is one of our favorite Haitian bands, especially because it brings us Compas. By the 1950s Haitian band leader Nemours Jean-Baptiste had pioneered “Compas,” a style that wedded Haitian folk music with merengue rhythms, African percussion and American big band jazz. As The New York Times explains it: “Compas, Haiti’s pop music, is a mass of rhythmic complication, in which syncopations are accented and pass for downbeats, and rhythms interlock and repeat, all for the benefit of dancers.” In this video from 1984 we see the dynamic Tabou Combo perform live.
