9 PM Christine Salem, from Réunion Island, tours her new release, Salem Tradition, on the Cobalt label. What she sings is moloya – voice-and-percussion, spirit possession music, polyrhythmic and percussive. Réunion, a French “overseas department” that sits some 586 miles off the east coast of Madagascar, was uninhabited before the French claimed it in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century they brutally removed Africans from Mozambique and Madagascar to work cane and coffee plantations on Réunion, which makes moloya African diaspora music. In the mid-twentieth century the Catholic Church banned moloya, calling it “devil’s music” – ostensibly for its heathen nature, but more concretely because it was being used as a symbol of cultural identity and a rallying cry for political autonomy by the Communist Party of Réunion Island. Separatist fervor died down, and the ban was lifted, in the 1980s – but moloya’s still mostly a male domain. Christine Salem’s an edgy, feminist rebel, belting modern moloya – her own compositions, with lyrics that lie outside the music’s main spiritual intent – in her bluesy, powerhouse, contralto voice.