Growing up on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, the capital city of Haiti, Maudjeani Pelissier’s only exposure to music was through his father’s record player. The sounds of Motown, Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder would fill the small room where he spent most of his days, as it was dangerous to stray too far from his home.

When he arrived on Nantucket in 2019 at the age of 14, Maudjeani had still never played an instrument. But this March, he found himself on stage at the Nantucket Community Music Center for a solo piano and lyrical performance of four songs he had composed over the past year. The soft-spoken, self-taught seventeen- year-old musician was now headlining his own show.

“I still can’t believe I can actually play the piano now,” said Maudjeani (pronounced Moe-Johnny). “Sometimes I’m like, man. I’m pretty happy playing the piano.” The four songs Maudjeani played for a packed house at the music center are part of his debut album, Blooming, which is a work in progress that he describes as “pop music with a twist.” The album title is fitting for the Nantucket High School senior who just picked up piano less than a year ago and has learned to play simply by listening, trial and error and lots of practice, rather than reading music. “I just figure it out,” he said.

In June, Maudjeani will graduate from Nantucket High School before heading off to UMass Lowell to study music production, capping off a fateful journey to the island from Haiti just before the pandemic hit. But COVID-19 was far from the first hardship he had experienced. Maudjeani was only six years old when a massive earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010. Port-au-Prince, just 15 miles from the epicenter, was devastated, and some estimates pegged the casualties as high as 300,000 people. The calamity defined Maudjeani’s childhood.

“It was very scary,” Maudjeani said. “I remember you couldn’t use the water; there was no electricity. At that moment, we had the whole neighborhood coming into one place, then we would put food together and do stuff for each other until people could start living by themselves again.” The family collected rainwater to purify and drink, he recalled, and while he didn’t lose any of his immediate family members in the quake, they knew many who did. In the years that followed, the area never truly recovered and the conditions left Maudjeani isolated.

“When I was in Haiti, most of my life I just stayed in my house,” he said. “The only thing I probably did was go to my house and go to school, back and forth. It was not very safe to go out by myself or do anything else really. So I wanted to go to a place where I could actually get out of the house and do something else. School was very hard there too. There were many days I could not go to school because of protesting and other problems so I really wanted to leave the country at this point.”

As he entered his teenage years, he found that opportunity. Maudjeani’s aunt, Moirar Leveille, had lived on Nantucket for years, working as a mental health counselor and motivational speaker. She was the connection that brought Maudjeani and his mother to the island in 2019. The initial transition, he recalled, was a bit of a struggle. “I remember it being really confusing,” Maudjeani said. “I was not used to a big school like this. In my school, there was probably nineteen kids for the whole grade. I got used to it.” — Maudjeani Pelissier



But just as he was getting used to it, the pandemic arrived and the schools closed. Remote learning was ushered in, and Maudjeani was once again stuck at home and isolated, just under much different circumstances. That’s when he picked up his aunt’s guitar. “It was during the first week of COVID,” he said. “I didn’t have much to do and my aunt had this guitar, and I decided to start learning it.”

As restrictions began to lift, Maudjeani started to play for fun with a group of island musicians, including Bob Walder, and had the opportunity to play a piano for the first time. Maudjeani also knew of the Nantucket Community Music Center from his high school music club, and as soon as it reopened its doors to the public in 2021, he became a regular. “I started coming here almost every day to practice,” he said of the organization’s headquarters on Centre Street. “I was self-taught pretty much, and I’ve just been trying to figure out everything, transpose what I hear and put it into the instrument.”