Kicking Horse Culture Presents: WESLI

Event Description

One of the most gifted global-roots musicians living in Canada, Wesley Louissant – stage name Wesli – was born in Haiti but fled the coup that deposed Jean-Bertrand Aristide and found himself at age 11 in a Cuban refugee camp. Musically precocious, Wesli was still in his teens when he began to establish an international reputation as a performer and arranger.

At age 21 he won a scholarship to study music in Montreal, and that has been his base ever since. After impressive collaborations with celebrated diasporic musicians such as Senaya and Sara Rénélik, Wesli began recording his own CDs, with Rapadou Kreyol winning a 2019 Juno for World Music Album of the Year (one of many awards he’s received). Delving ever more deeply into Caribbean and African groove-based musical forms such as reggae, Haitian voodoo, rara, Afro beat, and hip-hop, Wesli creates music that is highly danceable, but also has political and cultural insights embedded in messages of hope, truth, and peace.

“You want to say something useful to society, not just entertain people,” he explains. Latterly, this gifted vocalist and multi-instrumentalist has taken a deep dive into the Creole culture of Haiti, resulting in the well-reviewed CD Tradisyon, which focuses on Haiti’s acoustic and traditional roots music. This charismatic, effortlessly uplifting performer will be in full flight in Golden as he takes to the stage with his electrifying – and very international – seven-piece group.

According to New York-based arts-and-culture daily Nippertown, “This crackling band had the crowd jumping out of their seats. Complex but never busy, they came across as an extremely seasoned unit dedicated to escaping gravity and inviting us along for the ride.”