Sydney Madden reports on the influence of DJ and music producer Michaël Brun for NPR. 

In the breezy heat of a Brooklyn summer night, DJ Michaël Brun leads a jubilant crowd of 8,000 chanting: “Bayo! Bayo!” Translated from Haitian Creole, “bayo” means “To give.” It’s not only the name of one of Brun’s most loved songs, it’s the namesake of his yearly festival that’s taken on new meaning amid its biggest show yet.

In years past, Brun and his team have toured the BAYO show around cities in the U.S. and the Caribbean, but for the 2024 edition, the festival was consolidated into one night (June 15), in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, to become the destination event for the diaspora. As fans of all ages fill up the bandshell seating area and back hundreds of yards to the fences, Haitian, Jamaican, Guyanese and Trinidadian flags are donned as fashion at the waist, the neck, the head and, naturally, as extensions of waving hands.

“If you never experienced what Haitian culture, Caribbean culture felt like, it’s supposed to be the most concise version of that in a single event,” Brun laughs. “The whole focus is on bringing joy.”

For Brun, that joy started with a collaboration back in 2016. The musician, who is Haitian and Guyanese and grew up in Haiti, was on a trip to Gonave Island to assist with a school’s music program. Working with the children inspired Brun and his collaborators, Strong G, J. Perry and Baky, to give the students an anthem of confidence.

“So much of Haiti in the international news and conversations people would have about the country, it was about how Haiti is impoverished, going through tragedy after tragedy, crisis. It was always negative,” Brun says. “As somebody who lives in the country who is constantly getting this barrage of negativity about yourself, conversations we were having [when making the song] were, like, ‘There’s so much more to the country than that,’ and if we wanted to tell that, we might as well put it in a song.”

“We’re saying ‘We’re giving you culture, we’re giving you music, our story of freedom’,” Brun describes the translated lyrics. When Michaël and friends gave “Bayo” the classic car test after recording it, they started impromptu block parties in the streets of Jacmel, Haiti. From there, he says, “we knew we had something.”

Now, eight years in, Brun has worked to extend BAYO’s community reach with each show. As it has grown to an annual fest, BAYO still maintains a familial, block party feel. While summertime is the thick of festival season, with sky-high ticket prices and crowded rosters, BAYO offers a different experience for fans.

When BAYO is announced, Brun is the only advertised name on the lineup, and all other performers are surprises revealed the night-of. As a sought-after producer for artists from across genres — Latin, electronic, jazz, pop — Brun operates as a maestro onstage, curating a fête of acts that purposely spans generations. And as much as the crowd buzzes with anticipation for who will pop out during the show, patrons are just as excited to embrace others in the audience with them.

“So many of us left Haiti because we had to, not because we wanted to,” says Rolandjhita Chavannes, who fled Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. As a fan of Brun’s since 2013, Chavannes says she’s been to more than four BAYO tours. “We come here to see our family members, our friends and party like we used to in Haiti, and that’s what’s different for us than any other festival — it’s coming here every year and seeing our people happy, just Haitian joy.”

“That isn’t something I saw when I was growing up,” remembers Mireille Lemaine as she claps along in her lawn chair. “Haitian music is huge now. Haiti’s on the map. When I was a kid, growing up in Brooklyn in the ‘80s, it wasn’t like that.”

“The really cool thing that Michaël Brun’s able to do is he’s able to bridge the gap between older and younger Haitians, and that’s probably, like, the biggest challenge,” notes Jeff Periera, 35, who came from New Jersey to attend this year’s show, his first BAYO. “The music’s so different from one generation [to the next]. You’ve got your konpa, your rara, your Rabòday … but Michaël does a really good job of blending it all together and bringing us all together.”

This year’s lineup jumped all over the globe, including Haitian American R&B newcomer Serina, Nigerian pop sensation Oxlade, hype Haitian DJ TonyMix, Jamaica’s Serani, Colombia’s J Balvin and Brooklyn-bred, neo-soul icon Maxwell. [. . .]

For full article, see https://www.npr.org/2024/06/22/g-s1-5470/michael-brun-bayo-festival-haitian-joy

[Photo above by Lanna Apisukh for NPR, detail: Fans cheer in the crowd at Michaël Brun’s BAYO concert at the Lena Horne Bandshell in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park on Saturday, June 15.]