Various Artists: Alefa Madagascar: Salegy, Soukous & Soul from the Red Island 1974-1984
Richard Gehr on May 13, 2020
Sort of a long-deferred appendix to the remarkable guitarists explored on 1992’s A World Out of Time, which documented Henry Kaiser and David Lindley’s musical field trip to the relatively alien African island of Madagascar, the new Alefa Madagascar: Salegy, Soukous & Soul from the Red Island 1974-1984 (Strut) demonstrates how that particularly fecund era generated exotic and beautiful pop experiments. Check out the short waves of “Not Fade Away” in Papa James’s “Ngoma Hoe,” the scorching guitar of Saka Dit the King’s “Ody Ody” and the hybrid gospel-soul Afro-rave in Jean Kely et Basth’s “Andosy Mora.”
