RIP 2023: Reflections on Losses

I don’t like to read obits. As I get older, more and more of the names are familiar - or even people whose paths I’ve crossed. In looking through the roundup of prominent deaths in 2023, two stood out for me. One was Burt Bacharach. I never met the composer but I literally bumped into him at a mid-Manhattan rehearsal studio in the mid-1970. I was juggling a wire service job and a music career and had just completed a two-hour rehearsal with a jazz-fusion band. As we navigated the narrow stairs down to the street, a man and a woman brushed imperiously past us to the curb without giving us a second look. As I prepared to protest, I realized it was Bacharach and Dionne Warwick. Although I had the New Yorker’s automatic disdain of celebrity, I was star-struck enough to mute my annoyance. They got into a waiting limousine. That would have been the end of the story, except I heard more clatter on the stairs and turned to see Janis Joplin and her musicians coming down to the street. Only in New York. Her attitude was completely different. “Were you the group in the studio next door?” she asked. “You sound really good.” She chit-chatted until her bandmates flagged down a yellow cab, piled in and drove off. I was struck by the difference between Bacharach-Warwick and Joplin: corporate music vs. down to earth. A flash of heels and a suit and tie as the driver closed the door behind Warwick. Joplin’s Fry boots and jeans as she climbed into the back of a cab. Weeks later I would write my first feature for the AP about the tragic lives of two rock musicians who died weeks apart: Janis Joplin and Jimmy Hendrix.

The death of Haitian artist Ronald Mevs last December was an exclamation point in the year 2023. We were both born in September 1945 in Haiti and knew each other for more than half century. Although we often went years without seeing each other, when we finally reconnected, our friendship always picked up where we had left off. Mutual friends in New York, including journalists at the AP, kept trying to introduce us, but we didn’t actually meet until I went to Haiti in 1971 after Francois Duvalier died. The ruthless dictator’s 19-year-old son had been enthroned as his successor by the same unsavory villains that had helped maintain his father’s two-decade rule by terror. But “Baby Doc” seemed more Interested in girls and motorcycles than in governing. The fragile air of detente lured Haitians like me and Ronald back to Haiti after a long absence. We met at Muriel’s, a Haitian version of Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca that flourished briefly in the neighborhood of Bourdon. Government ministers rubbed elbows with foreign entrepreneurs, pretend-CIA agents, local bankers and tonton macoutes.  He and I bonded over jazz, good food (he always knew the best hole-in-the-wall restaurants in Port-au-Prince) and our obsessive analyses of what was wrong with Haiti.  He opened a door for me into the emergent wave of post-primitive Haitian art and the vigorous debates that included Ronald, artist Jacques Gabriel, gallerist Hervé Méhu, and future French Academy “immortal” Dany Laferriere.  When I went to spend several months in Haiti in 1975, he was in the U.S. and let me use his house. When he went into exile in Montreal after the coup against President Aristide in 1991 we staged an exhibit of his work in our New York apartment. 

Ronald was a gifted storyteller. He had been a bartender at Tweed’s, a popular restaurant on West 72nd street, where he came across a full range of New York’s most bizarre artists and musicians. One of his favorite tales was about helping a completely drunk jazz bassist Charles Mingus make it to a gig in Greenwich Village. They hailed a cab and headed downtown. With the taxi flying down the West Side Highway, Mingus opened a door and decided to get out. Ronald, who was thin and wiry, described holding on to the 300-pound Mingus, while talking him out of exiting.

He was descended from a family of artists and was interested in making art from a young age. During his stay in New York, he studied graphics and design and embraced African-American artists. On his return, he maintained his artistic ambitions but he needed to make a living. On each of my annual trips to Haiti, he had a new scheme to earn some money. One year, it was a dump truck to collect and deliver construction materials. Another time it was a bar, then a nightclub or restaurant.  He staged concerts of emerging artists. His artistic talent was greater than his entrepreneurial skill and the art gradually rose to the surface. He was a listener, open to dialogue with everyone regardless of class or circumstance and fully aware of the social disparities in Haiti. When he relocated to the town of Jacmel to focus on his art, he mounted a workshop to help local artisans refine their skills and sell their work.

His work evolved in style and material over time. It reflected his own evolution as an artist and his deep exploration of symbols in Haitian culture. I last saw him in the flesh in Paris at the vast homage to Haitian Art at the Grand Palais in 2015. His contribution to the show: a sculpture in the shape of a boat/a log/a coffin. It was chilling and thrilling and complex in its ambiguities. Typical Ronald Mevs.