Damily

https://damilyband.bandcamp.com

DamilyTsapiky mastersEarly Years: Madagascar Cassette Archives, released 24 April 20201. Zaho Va2. Mangebakebake3. Mipay Havelo4. Tulear5. Nahoda Mpamelon Anake6. O KakaDamily was born in 1968 in Tongobory, a village surrounded by the great Malagasy river Onilahy. His career as a professional Tsapiky musician began in 1986; he settled in France in 2003, and since then has been developing his international career with his Malagasy musicians. This album is a compilation of his cassettes recorded in Madagascar between 1995 and 2002.We are in Toliara (Tuléar in French), a harbour on the west coast of Madagascar in the Mozambique Channel, between 1980 and 1990. The town looks more like a very large village consisting of thousands of sheet huts, with a centre built of solid, single-storey buildings. It is as flat as the beach on which it has landed.The atmosphere in Toliara is more that of a village than of a city. Upon meeting one other, one first wonders where one comes from, to which "ethnic group" one belongs, and the neighbourhoods look like community territories where people gather by family, by village, by origin.People who come from the countryside maintain a strong bond with their village of origin, because it is a common life project for one to go back home after having made his/her life in the city. There is a permanent back and forth between Toliara and the most remote regional towns; bush taxis, overloaded with as much food and consumer goods as passengers, never stop going in and out of town. The regional culture, with music at the forefront, is very strongly marked by this exchange between the town and the countryside, two worlds with porous borders, which interpenetrate each other.Roads and transport infrastructure are thus underdeveloped. Life is organised in a relatively small area, a characteristic that is found in the Tsapiky territory: it covers an area that extends up to 150km north, 250km east, 200km south, and can extend as far as Ihosy in the east and Morombé in the north. Toliara is the capital of the southwestern province, and the capital of Tsapiky.The Pecto, ancestor of the TsapikyThe Tsapiky arrived in the wake of the Pecto which from the 1970's to the mid 80's was the local music of Toliara.With flared trousers, fans of rock as well as of the standards inherited from the colonial period and steeped in Malagasy culture, these musicians were urban, cultured, often affluent and comfortable with the diverse influences that crossed over in Toliara at that time.They were also the only musicians in the region who recorded their songs in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, for the record company Discomad. Occasionally they performed concerts in the countryside around Toliara, where people flocked to see them, and several hits were produced in this period. At the same time, funeral wakes, healing and circumcision ceremonies were all important in the life of Malagasy people, and regional and traditional music were largely represented in these ceremonies, as they were seen as a way of "talking with the ancestors".The Pecto, with its harmonies that are tinged with the latest influences, slightly elitist and often danced to at the balls, was evolving rapidly at that time, in contact with the regional traditional music and its imperative need for trance.In the mid-1980s, music gear, which was until then a rather rare and uncommon thing, was now becoming more accessible and was arriving in the hands of new musicians who came out of the bush around Toliara. Born during the Malgachisation of the country set up by Didier Ratsiraka in the 70's, these musicians, often poorly educated and deeply rooted in the "traditional" Malagasy culture, were "cooking" with their own ingredients. In Toliara, the Tsapiky, alongside other genres like Soukous, Malagasy and international variations of evangelical music, was developing as quickly in the city as the countryside, closing the door somewhat to outside musical influences.The Tsapiky had few means: cheap loudspeakers, 2nd hand amplifiers often assembled on the spot, drums made of barrels and zebu skin. A music of emergency, it seeked rather high tempos, in order to operate a return to traditional music and to rediscover the "taste of the bush". At the same time, it was becoming, alongside traditional instruments, one of the major parts of daily life and traditional ceremonies. A lot of things were combined and played a role in the construction of the Tsapiky : codes of the tromba music or bilo rituals, the marovany (zither on case), mandolins and accordion, polyphonies... in short, the "endemic" ingredients of music from the Toliara region were being put back at the centre of the game. The role of the bass was reinvented with the increasing development of melodic lines, and the guitar was becoming predominant. The playing was now completely centered on the guitar, so much so that guitarists like Boloko or Kaboto, the most famous of this pivotal period, didn't necessarily have singers.As a child, Damily played in his village on a small three-stringed nylon guitar, and then on a local guitar made by his neighbours. Because of his rather short fingers, his little finger could hardly touch the low strings on the top of the neck.Rather than removing the 6th string as some of the guitarists of that time did, he developed a special technique, in which the two bass strings (5th and 6th) were being played or released at the same time as the other fingers were hitting the high strings.It doesn't sound like much but he soon realized that this way of playing added depth to the harmonies and so his newly invented technique was immediately taken up by other guitarists of the time. It is accepted today as a mark of Tsapiky guitar playing in general, and further accentuates Tsapiky's shift towards a much more aggressive and "biting" music.At the end of the 1980s, the Pecto was already completely overtaken by his little brother with a fiery temperament that triggered a real fever throughout the region. The Tsapiky, its audio cassettes and ghetto blasters had just blown away the Pecto and its old-style 7''.The mandriampototsy, a new and original type of concertIn the city, music venues could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The Tsapiky wasn’t very comfortable there : the "tsapikists" called these places "posh". The real playground of the Tsapiky was developing elsewhere, in these sessions organized at home by families, where one could witness several days and nights of uninterrupted music, organized according to traditional Malagasy rules, in the open air. This new type of entertainment was called the mandriampototsy.If this "new music" was so successful, it was due to the fact that it responded to a strong societal demand : healings, circumcisions, burials and reversals, celebrations... traditional ceremonies that punctuate the life of Malagasy in the southwest, all ethnic groups combined. And if the organization of such an event was costly for families, it was nevertheless unavoidable for each of them, because it is part of the cult of ancestors, with all its codes and "taboos". In Madagascar, God, ancestors and the dead are one, and the living share everything with them: joys, sorrows, diseases, projects or great events of family life... the mandriampototsy were becoming omnipresent.Communication with the ancestors was established during these ceremonies through music; musicians therefore had a special status and an important responsibility in the proper conduct of sacred rites.The mandriampototsys were traditionally held from March to December, and during these 9 months, the orchestras rotated... for Damily, it was practically a non-stop thing, except for the months of January and February, the months of the "mpio lalitsy" ("swallowing flies"). Based in Toliara, he sometimes didn’t even have the time to come back between two contracts : moving from one ceremony to another, he squared the region by road (if such a thing existed), by dugout, zebu cart or on foot. Tsapiky's orchestras thus went to the remotest places to honour the ancestors. In town, they were hired to parade on tractor tra

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