The arts are alive and well at The Door! Val Jeanty, one of our fabulous teaching artists, was recently featured in The Fort Greene Local for her unique perspective on music and culture in Brooklyn. Val teaches DJ skills, studio mixing and mastering, and music production in The Door's own music studio! Click here for the full article or read it below!
The Local: Fort Greene/Clinton Hill
Val-Inc Brings Haiti to a Bed-Stuy Studio
On the top floor of a industrial looking building, a loft in Bedford-Stuyvesant has been transformed into a sound lab and a reminder of home for the musician who lives there. Covered with paintings and accessories from Haiti, the loft sets the mood for Val-Inc's recordings and serves as a reminder of what inspired her to become a musician. The surroundings are just as much of a synthesis of creativity as the music created in them.
"I'm trying to recreate Haiti here," said Val Jeanty, 37, who goes by the stage name Val-Inc. "It's what I bring to this space that makes it more than just a studio. Things like the smell brings me back home."
"It's beyond explaining. (Haiti is) like this times a hundred," she said.
Ms. Jeanty captures many different ideas and cultures within her art, and sees a similar blend in her neighborhood.
To her, Bed-Stuy is also a reminder of where she comes from. A resident of Brooklyn for 15 years, Ms. Jeanty's decision to move to the borough was influenced by the range of sights and sounds she experiences in the area, she said. Her neighborhood may seem relatively small, but it holds secrets that even many long time residents may not be aware of, she explained.
"I like the way that time slows down here (in Brooklyn)," said Ms. Jeanty. "You can be driving down a block you’ve never been through and feel like you’ve been taken somewhere else."
Her music has a similar effect of transporting listeners to another place. Val-Inc blends traditional-sounding music from Haiti with synthesized sounds and instruments to develop a genre she calls "Afro-Electronica."
"Val-Inc means Val-Incorporating," said Ms. Jeanty. "When I am recording, everything comes together."
Ms. Jeanty grew up in Haiti and would often travel to see her family in Miami and New York. She left Haiti with her mother, a teacher, in 1986 after Jean-Claude Duvalier, then the president of Haiti, was overthrown and schools there were shut down. Though they originally settled in Miami, Ms. Jeanty was drawn to New York by her visits here as a child. She was captivated by the city, she said.
"I ended up here in New York because it felt freer than Miami," said Ms. Jeanty. "I would go to Harlem and wanted to see the Apollo. It was a big deal to go there, and when I finally did it was so great."
Ms. Jeanty became interested in music as a child, watching drummers play in her hometown in Haiti. When she got her own apartment, she realized that she couldn't play after a certain hour. She asked a DJ to borrow his studio and then became fascinated with his drum machine. She learned how to sample and spin records, inspired by DJ Q-Bert and Roc Raida of the X-Ecutioners.
Ms. Jeanty made her first album in 2000 through a Van Lier fellowship — an organization dedicated to fostering low-income and minority artists in New York City. Since then, she has made another album and played at venues as close as the Whitney Museum and the Village Vanguard, and as far as Switzerland and Italy. She also teaches at an youth development center on the Lower East Side called The Door, where she instructs on the basics of being a DJ, studio mixing and mastering, and music production. She spends the rest of her time working on her next album.
She often utilizes her collection of Haitian records and feels that she brings a different approach to her music because of her background, she said.
"Haiti is very warm and welcoming," said Ms. Jeanty said. "It has a lot of art you can see everywhere. My dad is an architect, and my sister plays the piano. So creativity was all around me."
"I was always into music," she said. "As a kid I would just start nodding and dancing and felt free."