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. 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.
