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Discovering the sound of the sapphire mines
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Over the past 15 years, the popular music of Africa has been aired in a thousand varieties. For those who have dug into the well, it might seem that the continent has few surprises left. But on a recent research trip to the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar, I was elated to discover not just a great new artist but a whole new genre of utterly distinctive pop music. It came near the end of the journey, in the far southwest of this California-sized island, in the sleepy, poor port city of Tulear. Our musical guide, Hanitra of the Malagasy roots group Tarika, had been raving about a rowdy, guitar-driven style of music called tsapika (or tsapiky, but either way it’s pronounced "tsa-PEEK"). She told tales of slipping into sapphire-mining camps after dark and being accosted by guards with Kalashnikovs, who were ready to string her up until she explained she was there to hear her guitar hero, tsapika bandleader Jean Noël. We had been gathering tape for public radio’s Afropop Worldwide show but had gotten only mixed results. We caught Noël’s group on an off night in a staid Tulear restaurant. The best tsapika band we heard were playing on the back of a pick-up truck, heading out of town to a mining camp, without us. We bought many cassettes, but they were mostly of poor sound quality. Tsapika thrives far from the country’s recording capital, Antananarivo, and had little national audience at the time. A good recording of the style was not easy to find. Nevertheless, the music, with its relentless beat, wailing, tuneful vocals, and giddy guitar riffing, was too infectious to give up on. Now, with the release of a historic 15-track compilation Tulear Never Sleeps (Earthworks/Stern’s), tsapika has gone international, and it’s one wild ride. Jean Noël’s "Ela Lia (Too Long)" kicks off with the crisp, clean clang of trebly electric-guitar notes. A snapping snare drum cranks up the beat, a kind of restless rockabilly pump with a hint of the most driving Congolese soukous beat you’ve ever heard. High, sweet female voices harmonize in plaintive, full voice as liquid bass lines slide unctuously through the scramble of guitar lines. There’s a particular fleetness to the guitar work; it’s as crisp and precise as Congolese guitar but much more angular and darting. In place of cycling or sustained melodies, the arrangements offer fitful, short bursts of start-and-stop action, with speedy, nervous phrasing suggestive of an animal on the run from a predator. But in the hands of a master like Jean Noël, or Niriko, the soloist for Tsy An-Jaza, the technique and the style are exceptional, right down to the chiming harmonics at the end of an edgy solo. Tsapika is certainly related to the rich traditional music of the region. Its speedy pace echoes the recreational village boogie played on squeeze-box accordion or the omnipresent kabosy, a ukulele-like handmade lute, by the Marikoto people. The clipped phrasing of the guitar lines evokes the trance music of the marovany box zither played by the Vezo people. But electricity and volume are key to this sound, which is normally played at blasting levels with distortion you won’t get from any effects pedal — speaker membranes must be sacrificed for this. Even in the relatively pristine recordings on Tulear Never Sleeps, tsapika is the very definition of exuberance. The earliest versions of the genre — called pecto — date back to the late ’70s, but tsapika came into its own when precious minerals were discovered in the earth of this neglected, mostly infertile corner of the island. In the wild-west atmosphere of an impromptu sapphire-mining camp, where a peasant might become a wealthy man in a single day, hard drinking and hard partying are the order of the night, and tsapika is the soundtrack to that drama. In the songs by the eight groups featured here, we get social advice and tales of domestic adventure: a man with five children by different mothers, another with two lovers living under the same roof. There are also warnings about the deceitfulness of men and the dangers of mixing money and friendship, and there’s lots of boastful self-promotion. The relentless pace is broken by a tsapika lullaby from veteran band Rivo Doza, a slow, moody trance piece with a 6/8 rhythm from a young group called Teta, and two acoustic kabosy pieces from Jeff Nhoré. These last deliver the white-knuckle rhythms found elsewhere on the album, but the muted texture of strummed, fishing-line strings offers a pleasant respite from the ringing electric-guitar tones that dominate Tulear Never Sleeps. Tsapika is formulaic — in essence, it’s an electric folk music. But to spruce it up with nifty arrangements and the sort of polish now typical in Congolese and South African pop — as some Malagasy producers have done — can easily spoil the music’s impact by dulling the razor-sharp edges. The groups on this CD are unlikely to tour Madagascar, let alone Europe or America. But their unique music deserves its place among the other, more familiar genres that make up the body of Afropop on the international market.
BY BANNING EYRE
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