WOMAD

D'Gary

From Madagascar

Madagascar's D'Gary is one of the world's great acoustic guitarists. Because he hails from the big red island off the coast of Africa, and plays music rooted firmly in his native tradition, he remains a largely unknown quantity in the rest of the world. But even a cursory listen to his supple, imaginative fretwork proves him a man with true mastery of his instrument.Born at Tananarive in 1961, D'Gary is the son of a Bara gendarme. The Bara are an ethnic group who raise zebus on the semi-desert Horombé high plateaus of southern Madagascar. His father was transferred to Tulear in 1969, where the boy spent his youth and learned to play pecto, dance music much in fashion with young people of the area, on a home-made guitar.His father retired in 1978, when D'Gary was 17, and they moved to Betroka, capital of the Bara region. He became aware of the wretched plight of his people - the deteriorating land, and zebu-rustling, a sport by which a young man who wanted to get married traditionally proved his prowess, but now organised by big businessmen running armed gangs and subverting justice. D'Gary took up the cause of his people, setting their sufferings to music.His father died not long after getting to Betroka. D'Gary plunged bodily into musical research, laying the bases of the style that would make him world-famous. He applied to the guitar the freedom that the traditional instruments of the peoples of southern Madagascar already had, with the songs and the chords of the ethnic group from which the piece came.He reharmonised freely, almost creating a new instrument with each of his "open tunings". It is this use of a good dozen different chords that make his style inimitable, and this detailed research that has made him one of the most surprising international guitarists, a musician respected the world over for his unique playing style and for his "untunings", or freestyle guitar chordings.By 1987, D'Gary was working in the studio of a patron in Tamatave, Dida, and finally had a guitar (up till then he had, like most Malagasay musicians, played on whatever he could find). Two years of unstinting hard work enabled him to develop an impressive degree of technical skill. In 1991 the American guitarists Henry Kaiser and David Lindley came to Malagasy to lean about Malagasy music. They had him record a solo album, "Malagasy Guitar", and gave him the first guitar he had ever owned.Up until 1994, D'Gary's output followed two distinct guitar and vocal styles: one freeranging, appealing to foreign audiences and particularly suited to the numerous festivals at which he performed; the other adapted to the music orchestrated by Malagasy producers for the island's market.D'Gary's style is based on the Malagasy marovany, a boxlike zither. He could use his impressive technique to dominate everything, but instead lets his fingers serve the songs, with the guitar both accompanying and providing counterpoint to the voices' rough harmony. With heart and soul in the island's highlands, D'Gary makes no concessions to Western musical tastes. But with the dazzling ability he displays on instrumentals, he doesn't have to. The world will recognize his genius sooner or later. D'Gary's music is about a rediscovery of traditional Malagasy music through the finesse and the precision of a modern maestro.2001 Biography