Definition
Kompa is a Haitian popular genre. The genre is first called compas direct — the word compas refers to the regular tempo, the held measure, the mechanical relationship to time that makes the music perfectly danceable. Through the decades, the spelling creolizes: compas, kompa, konpa — the three forms designate the same genre.
The classic instrumentation rests on a held rhythm section (bass, guitar, drums), a horn section (saxophone, trumpet), a keyboard laying harmonies, and a solo voice singing in Haitian Creole. It is a music for close dancing, sustained over time.
Kompa is the reference popular music in Haiti. It exports across the Caribbean and through the Haitian diaspora — New York, Miami, Montreal, Paris.
Influence on cadence-lypso and Bouyon
Kompa is one of the three explicit ingredients of Gordon Henderson's cadence-lypso, crossed with Trinidadian calypso and jazz [S-1]. Cadence-lypso thus becomes Dominica's signature before Bouyon.
Bouyon thus inherits kompa through cadence-lypso. Not directly — there is no Bouyon track that is accelerated kompa. But the sustained pulse and the relationship to regular tempo pass from kompa to cadence-lypso, then from cadence-lypso to Bouyon.
Not to be confused with cadence-lypso itself: kompa is Haitian, cadence-lypso is Dominican. The former feeds the latter, but remains a distinct genre, still alive in Port-au-Prince and across the diaspora.
