Roots musician Kaia Kater crafts a sound that seems to hover right above a busy crossroad — a place where old meets new, where the North meets South, and where different cultures don't necessarily collide, but sometimes find a way to pave a new path.
While not yet 30-years-old, Kater's extensive experience as a performer can be traced to her beginnings in Montreal. Her grandfather built harpsichords and guitars, and her mother organized folk festivals featuring music from Joni Mitchell and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
Kater plans to release a new album called "Strange Medicine" in the coming months. Kater joined NHPR's Rick Ganley in Studio D to play a few tunes and share her musical influences.
Kaia Kater: I had taken up the banjo because of a friend of the family, basically. His name is Mitch Podolak and he founded the Winnipeg Folk Festival, and my mom was running folk festivals at the time. So his two great passions in life were cooking great barbecue and teaching people how to play claw hammer banjo.
I think he recognized that I was into music, and that I was curious. And so, he handed me a banjo and gave me a lesson.
Rick Ganley: Barbecue and banjo. That's a real public service.
Yeah, all the 'B's'.
And I think after I got proficient enough at the banjo, some of the creativity started coming out, and I started saying, like, 'how can I figure out a way to merge this, like, very old style with some of my newer inspirations and songwriting? '
We call the banjo the well of souls, because it it carries —almost unfairly— it carries so much of the the history of the Transatlantic slave trade.Kaia Kater
Well, let me ask you about those inspirations. Who of the last 10, 15 years— who would be a modern influence for you on your playing or your writing?
That's a great question. There's plenty of players who I admire.
I would say I recently learned actually, that the claw hammer banjo— what we call the claw hammer banjo style— is actually a style of the Jola people in West Africa. It's called Jola style. And so I felt like I came to the banjo seeing it really as this very white Appalachian instrument, and going through the gauntlet of the last 10 or 15 years of learning the instrument, I've learned that its roots go way back to West Africa.
And so I've really gotten into and been a fan of a lot of Black banjo players like Rhiannon Giddens, and Jake Blount is a fantastic banjo player.
We mentioned earlier that your mom is from Canada, but your father is actually from Grenada. He fled to Canada in the 1980s after the U.S. invaded. And reflecting on where he comes from and his musical influences, I'm wondering if there are parallels with traditional Caribbean folk music to those found in Appalachian or the American South.
That's a that's a great question. I could get super nerdy about this, but I'm going to try to keep it short.
We call the banjo the well of souls, because it carries —almost unfairly— it carries so much of the history of the transatlantic slave trade, you know. And the banjo being a portable instrument, the banjo being a stringed instrument, which means that white plantation owners didn't see it as something that was as threatening as a drum— talking drum— something that could be used to communicate between between enslaved Black people.
And so in the Caribbean, you hear a lot of steelpan traditions, a lot of calypso traditions. And, in the Caribbean drums happened not to be banned there.
When you hear the influence of like different West African cultures, you hear it represented a lot more holistically in Caribbean music. But I do love to bring my banjo to Grenada, and my little cousins all love to play it. They're obsessed with it. And maybe I'm going to be the one who who brings the banjo revival to the Caribbean. Who knows?
Why not?
[Laughs] Why not?
So in addition to writing songs and touring, I know you're also composing scores for film and the TV series 'The Porter' right now. Can you tell us about that project?
Yeah, 'The Porter' is a series that takes place in Montreal in the 1920s, just after the First World War. And the series sort of centers around train porters who were almost exclusively Black men, who worked on trains between Canada and the US.
And these kind of communication lines started between Black Americans and Black Canadians that led to a lot of the foundations of what we know as the civil rights movement.
So how do you go about doing that? How different is it to write or to score for film or TV. than to write your own for your own sake?
With writing to picture you, you have to put your ego away because you're coming in —music is coming in — at the usually at the very end of a project.
And you come in with your music and, and you try to do your best approximation of what the scene needs to emote. But at the end of the day, the directors and, and showrunners know better than you.
And I think that was definitely sometimes a hard pill to swallow for me because when I'm captain of my own ship, when I'm writing my songs, I get to decide what stays and what goes. And so I think it's just kind of inhabiting that role. And there's freedom in that, in kind of being the member of the band that gets to suggest their ideas, but at the end of the day, serve a greater purpose.
Well, thank you so much. This has been a thrill. Thank you. [Its] so good to have you in studio.
Great to be here.
