Mélissa Laveaux (born Mélissa Michelle Marjolec Laveaux on 9 January 1985) is a Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist of Haitian descent signed to No Format!. Her music has been described as a mix of roots, folk, and blues using her signature percussive finger-style guitar stylings and soulful vocals. In 2006, Laveaux released the first full-length album of her own songs, which she co-produced with percussionist Rob Reid (on tabla and cajón) and Lisa Patterson of Imaginit Music Studios. Laveaux has received critical praise from her peers in such magazines as Colorlines and was a Songs from the Heart recipient at the 2006 Ontario Council of Folk Festivals’ conference in the World Music category for penning “Koud’lo”.
In losing the cheque that would pay for her piano courses, a 6 year old Laveaux forged herself quite the destiny. She’ll eventually become a self-taught musician, by ear and through books. Thankfully, her mother has a liking for French singer-songwriters and Haitian big band jazz during long sessions of hair braiding. While her father, a guitarist in his downtime, spontaneously offers her a guitar in the summer of her 13th year.
Born in Montréal in 1985 to immigrated Haitian parents, Laveaux grew up in Ottawa (Ontario), in a mostly Anglophone community. One of her first challenges was then to integrate herself to her new environment without leaving behind anything cherished from her original francophone and creole culture.
At the crossroads of her multiple identities, Laveaux became increasingly aware of the gap between her life at home and her outside environment. A creative adolescent, she finds refuge in music, piecing mix tapes of late night radio hits to the more than slight disappointment of her parents, both teachers with hopes of her becoming a physician. She developed her music taste palette with North American folk music (Joni Mitchell, Feist, Tracy Chapman), British trip hop (Martina Topley-Bird, Morcheeba), alternative psychedelic Brazilian music (Adriana Calcanhotto, Os Mutantes), recent highlights in hip hop and nu-soul (Erykah Badu, Common, The Roots, The Fugees), voices that have become institutions in the African-American music (Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin) as well as more geographically distant stars in world music (Rokia Traoré, Lhasa…).
Brewing all of these influences into a mix of naiveté and instinctive brilliance, working daily on her guitar skills, Mélissa constructs her own, very personal, very rhythmic style of instrumental accompaniment. Soon she starts composing her first lyrics, her first songs. From hereon, this very contemporary songwriting, integrating all of her underlying culturally existential facets, instead of branding them with a political message, opts for the road of intimate storytelling, the adventure of a free voice speaking candidly in all confidence to an audience.
But music isn’t everything. Like her siblings, she is determined to pursue her studies, with the hopes of working in the field of Social Sciences, feeling the urgency and need to keep expressing herself artistically and academically seeing both as mutually influential. “One cannot go without the other. I need music to live and to live to inspire my music”, states the deeply convinced 23 year old. University of Ottawa becomes her alma mater, discerning her with a Bachelor of Arts in Ethics & Society.
During her studies, she performs at the open mic night at the graduate student pub. A young percussionist spots her and encourages her to jam with him and eventually form a band. As a duo, Mélissa tours with Rob Reid on weekends, playing campus pubs and small bars in Canada as well as garnering some attention from local and national media (CBC, SRC) and music institutions (Ontario Council of Folk Festivals, Montreal International Jazz festival). At 21 years old, she self-produces an album she puts up on myspace. 2007 comes and the French label No Format!, seduced, takes off to see her play in Montréal and signs her right away. That same year, she records her album, ‘Camphor & Copper’, produced out of base tracks from the original self-produced album.
Apart from two magnificently reinvented cover versions of lesser known originals (Elliot Smith’s « Needle in the hay » and Eartha Kitt’s « I Wanna be Evil ») that could be considered the imaginary bounds of her musical universe, her repertoire is composed of original pieces of an impressive maturity and freshness only found amongst the best in her field. With this album, Mélissa releases in one blow, all of the creative energy stored during years of learning and straightaway finds the right tone. Minimalist arrangements privilege the energy and poetic impact of her wording. Her voice, alone, unfurls, majestic and fragile, profound and sensual, furrowed with deep stirring under the immediate seduction, almost reworked and rearranged by the ever-present trilingualism in her life: the fluidity of the English, the nonchalant syncopation of the Kreyol, and the harmonic sophistication of the French.
Without a doubt, with such an album, the 23 year old Haitian-Canadian makes a startling debut in the small circle of the promising singer-songwriters of our era.
