One concert, many sounds

PROVIDENCE - The city was alive last night with the mellifluous sound of a steel drum and haunting vocals in Haitian creole. But the Providence Sound Session music festival was about so much more than music.

"It's a broad community effort that is capturing the entirety of our diverse community, with music being the single thread," Michael Van Leesten said.

Yesterday's performances included musicians from Trinidad, by way of Florida -- steel-drum jazz musician Othello Molineaux -- and Haiti via Providence -- vocalist Emeline Michel. There was also Yerba Buena, an Afro-Caribbean-Latin fusion band from New York, and Ron Carter, a black American bassist who's a big name in jazz. The program drew an ethnic rainbow of an audience.

"The thing about music: it's the one thing that transcends all the politics, transcends race and has the potential to lead us to a better world," Van Leesten, chairman of the Providence Black Repertory Company, which spearheaded the organization of Sound Session, said.

Van Leesten has high hopes for the festival, which is in its second year. "We expect that over the next five years, it will rival the Montreal Jazz Festival and the Newport Jazz Festival," he said.

He was interrupted when Mayor David N. Cicilline came over to shake his hand. Van Leesten told Cicilline that Sound Session needed a bigger venue, because he expected it to outgrow Waterplace Park by next year. "We'll figure it out," Cicilline said.

For now, Providence's festival remains the "baby brother" of Newport's, in the words of Scituate resident Walter Powell.

"We have groups here I've never heard of," he said, "but they're wonderful."

Powell and his wife, Ruth, watched yesterday from their Newport Jazz Festival lawnchairs. The couple has been attending the Newport festival for 20 years.

Charlene Tillman came early, equipped with lawn chairs and M&M's, and planned to stay. With her was a 12-person contingent spanning three generations of her family.

Tillman, 47, is a lifelong South Providence resident. In the last few years, she said, "there have been a lot of positive changes" in the city. Like the music festival. Tillman attended three days of the weeklong festival; on Monday, at a spoken-word event, "I had goosebumps," she said. "It was awesome."

From the stage, Van Leesten encouraged the crowd to mix.

"Meet your neighbors!" he bellowed between acts, as the next band set up. "Tell them how wonderful you think they are!"

Eric and Maria Cloutier came from Warren with their three children, Nicole, 8, Benjamin, 6, and Jack, 3.

The family comes to Providence a few times a year for WaterFire and other events, and the ethnically diverse crowd is part of the draw, Maria Cloutier said. It's something the kids don't experience in Warren, she said.

Surrounded by all kinds of people, "they don't think anything of it," she said, adding, "the kids love it, as long as they get to eat."

At Emeline Michel's first dramatic, low wail, the crowd went wild, then fell silent, captivated. She exuded sheer joy as she performed, and there was nary a still set of shoulders in the crowd.

Anne Eugene danced along blissfully, savoring the beats of her homeland. The 28-year-old Mount Pleasant resident spent part of her childhood in Haiti, where her parents were born. "It's not too often we get a celebrity from our home down here in Providence," she said. "It's a great way of gathering. We're actually running into people we haven't seen in a long time.

"We should definitely keep having it every year," she continued breathlessly, starting to dance again. "This is exciting."