Leyla McCalla of The Carolina Chocolate Drops will make her solo recording debut with Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes due out February 4 via the Music Maker Relief Foundation. The ...

Leyla McCalla didn’t intend to make a “protest album.” On her previous two albums, McCalla’s gentle voice floats alongside her cello, a vessel for her plucked folk-poetry and Haitian music, a ...

After Leyla McCalla played cello in the Carolina Chocolate Drops for a stretch, the singer is stepping out on her own with “Vari-Colored Songs,” an album paying tribute to the poet and novelist ...

Musician Leyla McCalla won’t play it straight. On the cellist’s stunning debut, she doesn’t draw from that instrument’s common genre or adopt its conventional tone. She doesn’t even stroke its strings ...

LEYLA McCALLA’S previous album, the Obama-approved Breaking The Thermometer, was a song cycle about Radio Haiti-Inter and how the station’s journalists chronicled the suffering of the country’s ...

Leyla McCalla released her first solo album, Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes, in 2014. NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro asks her about its re-release and the new song included on it. At 35, ...