Lives in Music

Mobility and Change in a Global Context

Sara Le Menestrel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429784286
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Lives in Music analyses interwoven patterns of mobility, change, and power in music and dance practices.

It challenges some commonly accepted conceptual tools that are ubiquitous in anthropology today, including cultural hybridity, transnational networks, and globalization. Based on seven "itineraries" that are the result of extensive ethnographic long-term field research efforts, the processes of geographic and social mobility, transformation, and power relative to music and dance practices are explored in different parts of the world. Seven writers provide life stories constructed through ethnographic techniques and life histories and supported by a deep knowledge of local customs.

Part I
Seven singular itineraries

1
Olivier Araste

Ancestors, memory, and a career as a maloya musician¹

Guillaume Samson

Figure 1.1 Olivier Araste on stage at the champ de foire of Bras-Panon (Reunion Island), November 25, 2011, at the release party of Lindigo’s fourth album, Maloya Power

Olivier Araste is a young maloya musician² and the leader and co-founder of Lindigo, a group that has been popular since 2006, the year of their hit song “La kazanou.”³ The song attracted interest from local cultural institutions and increased the band’s sales. Lindigo is currently one of the few maloya groups that continues to play private shows such as weddings and family parties and in the island’s discotheques (which are usually limited to performers of séga, dance-hall ragga, and zouk). They also play regular performances in concert halls and popular festivals and abroad in such locations as Madagascar, metropolitan France, Switzerland, Brazil, and Morocco. Lindigo’s ability to be locally active and play internationally represents a significant achievement for what could be called a “neo-traditional “group⁴ that is attempting to maintain a degree of authenticity that is tied to the idea of ancestral and cultural memory. Olivier’s personal and musical history allow him to weigh the different factors, practices, and representations implied by the various frames of reference and performance faced by maloya musicians engaged in professional and semi-professional careers. His itinerary offers an excellent example of maloya’s status within the island’s music scene.

First meeting and shared interests

I met Olivier in 2007 in a regional agency for popular music, the Pôle Régional des Musiques Actuelles (PRMA) on Reunion Island, where I am employed as a researcher. He came for a professional appointment and, after a brief, cordial exchange, gave me a copy of his first album.

We later ran into each other a number of times, including at a Lindigo concert that I was filming with the ethnomusicologist Victor Randrianary for the PRMA. We became better acquainted during a sèrvis kabaré⁵ at the home of a family of well-known musicians in Saint-Benoît later in the same year. The organizers of the event had invited a number of popular maloya artists to their sèrvis, lending a show-like atmosphere to the occasion. Around midnight, Olivier sang a few songs. Lindigo already had an excellent reputation on the island, and the crowd greeted Olivier enthusiastically. We began to get to know each other better that evening. In July 2008, I conducted two relatively extensive interviews with Olivier about his personal and family history. Olivier showed interest in how I would use the recorded interviews, and the idea of a kind of autobiography or life narrative began to take shape over the months that followed.

Our collaboration lasted until 2012, when his autobiography was published.⁶ Our relationship alternated between confidence and the more specific focus of publication. This relationship, which is founded on mutual interest, is methodologically significant⁷ because it helped me develop an understanding of Olivier’s itinerary and personality. On the other hand, it did not result in a neutral situation in which to collect data. Our plans to publish his itinerary altered the relationship, but it would be difficult to determine the effects of this process on the discourse that resulted from it.

Our relationship was not limited to interviews. Since 2008, we have seen each other regularly. I attended artists’ residencies, concerts, rehearsals, religious ceremonies, and press conferences, either alone with Olivier or with the group. I also frequented a number of Olivier’s collaborators, including managers and producers as well as family members.

I also interacted many times with Olivier outside of interviews and formal occasions. To some extent, the diversity of our interactions has helped me situate Olivier’s discourse and life inside a broader framework than an autobiography project alone would have permitted.

Why did I focus on Olivier Araste and not on a different maloya musician? One answer relates to the conditions that led me to meet him and Olivier’s desire to tell his own story. Another reasons involves Olivier’s position in the maloya scene and within the Reunion context at the time that this collective research project was beginning.

When I first interviewed Olivier, he was already famous on the island. Lindigo had recorded a second album and performed frequent concerts. The group first toured Madagascar in 2007 with financial support from a Reunion Island concert hall. Olivier had not yet attained the status of intermittent du spectacle, but he was making a living from his music. Lindigo had also produced its first radio “hit.” Lindigo gave the clear impression of being an “up-and-coming” group, with Olivier as its leader and central figure. These factors created ideal circumstances in which my research project could help me understand the many dimensions at work in developing and maintaining a career as a successful maloya musician. Olivier and Lindigo appeared to represent several specific factors that I believe are critical to understanding the maloya scene, including the diversity of spaces where music is broadcast and performed, multi-layered musical and choreographic meanings, and co-existing motivations to express collective cultural commitment and musical individualities and relationships with cultural institutions. Unlike other musicians who are perhaps less organized and available, Lindigo also provided a powerful image of the characteristics and professional and musical approaches that I had observed previously. Olivier’s itinerary can therefore be interpreted as broadly representative, although obviously not in any statistical sense. A few other maloya groups⁸ are committed to a similar artistic process, but only Lindigo combines all of these factors so powerfully on the contemporary maloya scene.

Neighborhoods, ancestors, and cultural heritage

Olivier was born on Reunion Island in the early 1980s and grew up in Paniandy, a small neighborhood in Bras-Panon in the eastern part of Reunion Island. Some residents are descended from Malagasy and African plantation workers. After ten years living between Saint-André and Bras-Panon (two nearby towns), Olivier was again residing in Paniandy, where he is well known. His parents and other members of his family also live there, and the family’s roots in the area date to the mid-twentieth century. Local roots offer clues to understanding Olivier’s discourse and creations. His memories of childhood and adolescence typically refer to the town and its important residents and elders. He stresses the Paniandy’s rural, historically poor:

I grew up in Paniandy. After cyclone Jenny in 1962, which destroyed the old kalbanons,⁹ the inhabitants of Paniandy moved towards the island closer to the cane fields. In the 1970s, there were still bidonvilles in that area. After that, things got modernized and, in 1983, the family moved to the “new Pani-andy” as people called it. This neighborhood is on the other side of the highway; it’s where my maternal grandparents lived before the cyclone. Because the family moved into a more comfortable house right after I was born, my father often says that my birth brought more light into the house.

(Olivier, October 10, 2008, personal interview)

Olivier’s deep connection to Paniandy is the locus of Olivier’s attachment to his family and ancestors. From Paniandy and his Creole ancestors (meaning those born on the island), Olivier’s family memories began with Malagasy and Comorian ancestors who arrived on the island as indentured servants in the early twentieth century. The names of some of these ancestral figures are featured in Lindigo’s songs.

Lindigo’s first album,¹⁰ recorded in 2004, included “Mahavaly,” a song that referred to Olivier’s paternal Malagasy ancestors. Two songs on their third album (2008)¹¹ pay homage to two other important ancestors, including “Pépé toulé,” his paternal grandfather and the son of Malagasy indentured servants and “Bakoko,” an ancestor from Anjouan who arrived in Reunion in 1902.

Ou la donn amoin la vi	You gave me life
Bakoko	Bakoko
Mersi ankor	Thanks again
Mersi ankor	Thanks again
Bakoko	Bakoko

This kind of homage to ancestors reveals a twofold thread in contemporary maloya music. This song evokes powerful memories on two interdependent levels: 1) the Creole islander level and 2) the pre-colonial level of Malagasy and African ancestors. Olivier’s discourse about his neighborhood and ancestors are common themes in his music both explicitly – as in this song – and when he refers to this two-part memorial motif. With Olivier, however, recognizing and paying musical homage to his heritage are not situated on a primordial, ideological, and essentially mythologized level – as is the case with other maloya musicians – but instead are directly related to his immediate family and daily life. Recognition is part of a strong genealogical awareness in which ancestors can cohabitate while being artistically honored. This relationship with the elders and the places where they lived extends to all of Olivier’s living relatives. His immediate family, particularly his father and several of his big brothers, are prominently featured in Lindigo’s project. His father (whose nickname is “Makok”) is a well-known character in Paniandy and a practitioner of popular Hinduism. As a member of the Lindigo Association that manages the group’s activities, he is actively involved in his son’s career and occasionally accompanies him to concerts and on tour. Lindigo’s success is connected for Olivier to a certain familial musical lineage. In fact, the Araste family involvement in popular music began when one of Olivier’s older brothers was the leader of Payanké, a group that played electrically amplified maloya and was moderately successful in the 1990s.

Payanké’s career, which Olivier played with for a while before it disbanded, represents a kind of backdrop for Lindigo in the sense that Olivier feels he has continued his older brother’s musical and familial mission. Family involvement in Olivier’s career is also pragmatic: The Lindigo musicians are intermittents du spectacle, and Olivier and his brother “Dado” (who is also in the band) make their living off of music via this system of state subsidies for artists. The group’s success thus contributes to the entire family’s prosperity as well as its social status.

Figure 1.2 Olivier and his father, Paniandy, 2009

References to neighbo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Seven singular itineraries
• PART II From singulars to plural
• Conclusion
• Index