Various Artists — OTÉ MALOYA: The Birth of Electric Maloya on Réunion Island 1975-1986 (Strut)
Ote Maloya by Various Artists
This stellar collection of songs documents the 1970s to 1980s period when a newly independent Réunion Island simultaneously rediscovered its colonial-era heritage and started experimenting with electric instruments. You can — and Strut, among others, has — perform this exercise with almost any region of the world. There comes a point when whatever was there before, pre-electricity, pre-mass market, pre-a-helluva-lot-of-contact-with-the-Western-world combines with Western rock and roll, i.e. when the first Jimi Hendrix albums and Stratocasters arrive in whatever post-colonial outpost. But Réunion Island seems to have been a particularly fruitful point of cross-fertilization, since its traditional music, maloya, was already a blend of French, African and Malay styles, of mournful slave chants and buoyant dances.
The compilations opens with Caméléon’s “La Rosée Si Feuilles Songes,” an early syncretism of sega, maloya, jazz and electric rock. Like all these songs, it is slinkily syncopated, laid-back and sensual, its cool keyboards generating a dreamy psychedelic haze. Even at its most celebratory, maloya seems to have a trippy reserve to it, an aura of shape-shifting spirituality.
There is also a strong element of protest in these cuts, rooted most likely in the genre’s slave plantation origins. French governments periodically banned maloya as subversive; when independence removed these restrictions, the music began to address social issues like poverty, racial discrimination and freedom to express oneself. Daniel Sandié, who performs the extraordinary “Défoule 3e Age,” struggled with alcoholism and spent time in prison; his song here, bolstered by swaggering tuba and scraping percussion, has the rough patina of life-long suffering, the rebellious persistence of getting through anyway.
Of course, some of these songs are straight-up party tunes, blaring with brass and reeds, undulating with warm, hedonistic energy. Marie Hélen et ses Créol’s “Séga Lesport” is pure pleasure; you learn from the notes that it comes from a theater performance about sports.
If the compilation has a star, it’s got to be Herve Imaré, who sings the vocals on the opening “La Rosée,” continues with the bass-bumping, funkified “Mele-Mele Pas Toué P’tit Pierre,” in mid-disc and next-to-closes things out with the remarkably soulful “Mi Donne a Toué Grand Cœur.” According to the liners — excellent as always — Imaré had a long career performing live but shunned the spotlight and recorded very little. His voice is god-damned beautiful, low and resonant, hallucinatory with an edge of harshness. You have to feel fortunate to hear it, not just once but three times, and indeed, to hear the rest of this, which is trippy and mesmerizing and singular, rooted in a particular place and history, but completely absorbing for strangers, too.
there is a joy in me today...it is overcoming and making the flesh electric...for this i am very happy...may it linger for a long while...joy i welcome you...mg
