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Jaojoby beats the heat at Grant Park
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Chicago Tribune, Jaojoby beats the heat at Grant Park >>
Once again, SummerDance has invited musicians from around the world to provide free outdoor concerts to appreciative Chicagoans. Jaojoby, from Madagascar, helped bring this season's series to a rousing near-conclusion on Thursday.
When Jaojoby's founder and lead singer, Eusebe Jaojoby, was starting out, he said, the great rhythm and blues singers of the 1960s and 1970s inspired the creation of his national music, called salegy. Although salegy's basic rhythmic structure and songs derive from the instruments and language of the Malagasy people, Jaojoby's irrepressible energy was pure soul.
Like the great R&B vocalists, Eusebe Jaojoby highlighted the rhythmic qualities of his voice as his shouts encouraged the band and audience on the SummerDance floor at the Spirit of Music garden in Grant Park. But he also showed a terrific range on slower romantic ballads, as if he knew that the night was not too sticky for close dancing.
Jaojoby also played up its strengths as a family band as its harmonies and choreography colorfully echoed Motown. Claudine Zafinera had some stirring duets with her bandleader husband and unleashed high-pitched ululations on her own. Eusebe Jaojoby's daughters Roseliane Vavy and Eusebia Fatoma twirled like synchronized tornadoes. Their lead vocal performance at the end of the night showed how they could soon become Madagascar's biggest sibling act. The group's unflappable instrumental precision could have stemmed from blood ties or that Thursday was getting to the end of its first big North American tour.
Most of Jaojoby's two sets stuck to salegy's upbeat rhythmic structure (6/8 time). The singer tried to explain the beat by saying that it's just like walking, but stepping while keeping an audience's attention is harder. It is a testimony to the band's enthusiasm that its adherence to the salegy time signature never sounded repetitive. Instead, keeping to this constant time helped Jaojoby shift seamlessly from the full-on barrage of guitarists and keyboardist to just voices with handclap accompaniment and back again. The group also emphasized different accents at surprising intervals.
Along with the combination of funk with Malagasy traditions, Jaojoby's music seemed to draw on as many different idioms as there were bands at SummerDance these past few months. Some of Elie Lucas Jaojoby and Jeannot's interlocking guitar lines resembled South African pop. Other times, a bit of reggae flowed in along with a few basic rock power chords on "Tany Tsaratsara." Rather than merely reaching for the familiar to North American ears, the group made it seem like these other international acts were being invited to a party.
Even though Thursday was a particularly muggy night, Jaojoby still propelled the dancers in the park to at least move their arms. Only a band this explosive can burst through and ultimately transcend Chicago's August humidity. 08/27/04 >> go there
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