Salegy is a popular genre of Malagasy music that starts with traditional acoustic folk from the northwestern coastal areas of the island and steps it up with electric instruments. Salegy is fast and funky, full of intertwining rhtyhms, melodic accordion lines and lilting high-life guitar. It almost always features aninstrumental middle section called the folaka (“broken”) during which the band leads the audience in an energetic burst of intricate and engaging polyrhtyhmic hand-claps.
Madagascar is located over 200 miles off the southeastern African coast and is home to a very diverse population that blends Indian, Southeast Asian and African cultures, as well as thousands of plant and animal species that only exist on the island — bottle-shaped baobabs, bat-eared aye ayes and ninety-nine varieties of lemur. “Tsy Akeo” is a groovy Malagasy song by the “King of Salegy,” Jaojoby. In music class we make hand motions to act like an “aye aye,” which is a lemur found in Madagascar that has the ears of a bat, the teeth of a rat and a long middle finger that it taps on tree trunks to locate insects, which it then eats by gnawing through the wood.
Country: Madagascar
Language: Malagasy
Genre: Salegy
Jaojoby performs Tsy Akeo
Engineering: Amon, Studio Brooklyn, New York
Musicians:
© Jaojoby Eusébe. Translation and arrangement by Jay Sand with permission.
