Lakou Mizik is more than a roots band from Haiti with a brilliant debut album, Wa Di Yo. It’s the musical spirit of a people standing up in joyful defiance of the forces that have laid it low—hurricanes, abject poverty, disease, rampant corruption, and in 2010 a devastating earthquake.

The nine-piece outfit rose from the rubble of the magnitude 7.0 quake that struck the small and overcrowded Caribbean country. Up to 300,000 people died. Most towns were flattened, leaving a million Haitians homeless, many starving. A cholera epidemic broke out, and still rages.

“It was chaos,” recalls Steeve Valcourt, leader, singer, and guitarist of Lakou Mizik, and cocreator with Jonas Attis of most of its songs, reached in Vermont. “After the earthquake everyone was so down, thinking it was the end of the world. Jonas and I, we were just musicians. We didn’t know how to help, but we took our tambours [hand drums] and acoustic guitar and went among the tents and to people whose houses were badly damaged, and we played for them. They loved it, and kept asking us to come back. And we did—every day. We wanted to find songs everyone could enjoy.”

The desperate situation brought multimedia producer Zach Niles from Boston to Haiti. He wanted to start a project using the music and story of Haiti to give non-Haitians a connection to a country that “mostly only gets pretty horrible press coverage, so you get a very one-sided sense of the place”, he says, reached in Jacmel, Haiti. “My intention was to create a multimedia piece with musicians and their stories, a one-off thing. I didn’t intend to manage a group but to meet musicians and look at old music and redo it, introducing it to a new generation of Haitians, and taking it to people around the world.”

Niles soon found lifelong friends Valcourt and Attis, who were connected to a large network of roots-oriented musicians. “We used to meet, because they were all part of other bands,” says Valcourt. “It’s like a dream team of Haiti that made Lakou Mizik. And for us Zach is a father, he’s much more than a manager.”

In Haitian Creole, lakou means “backyard”, a gathering place where people come to sing and dance, debate, or share a meal. Lakou Mizik’s members hail from all over Haiti and include young singer Nadine Remy, accordionist Belony Beniste, and Sanba Zao, a legendary figure of Haitian roots music in the vodou tradition. Two musicians play single-note cornets, sounded in rapid alternation to produce a hocketting effect.

Wa Di Yo’s most beautiful cut is “Tanbou’n Frape”, a paean to the hand drum and its crucial place in Haitian culture, sung by Valcourt to a gorgeously soft-and-swaying rhythm: “With it we have sung for freedom/The whole nation has transformed.”

“The nago rhythm is very traditional,” says Valcourt. “It says ‘Whenever we hear the drum our strength doubles.’ It captures the spirit of Haiti.…After 2010 many people thought Haiti was going to die, that it had no chance of doing something better, but we are still alive, and moving forward.”

Lakou Mizik plays the Vancouver Folk Music Festival’s Main Stage on Sunday (July 17).