Madagascar may lack a Starbucks. But there’s one thing it has no shortage of: incredible musicians. I encountered the latest example on Saturday night. We were downtown at a trendy place called No Comment. So trendy that when Monique tried to order a beer with a side mixer of “limonade” (think of a sickly-sweet Sprite with chemical overtones) she was told, no, but she could order a pre-mixed cocktail called a Panache, essentially the same thing but four times more expensive.

We were there to hear Teta. He was once, and possibly still is, a candidate to fill the acoustic guitar chair in our band. But wait, there’s more.

His older brother Tsihaky was Monique’s guitarist back in the day. Until, that is, the night in a hotel room in Fort Dauphin on the southern tip of the island, when in hopeless unrequited love he tied Monique to a chair and then drew a knife with every intention of slitting her throat. The rest of the group was sound asleep in their rooms. It was sheer chance, Monique says, that one of them happened to be awake, heard her screams, came running into the room and fought off her assailant.

A murderous wingnut Tsihaky may have been (he died a while ago). But he was also the originator of the guitar style, adapted from the traditional marovany, that put Madagascar on the world music map. Most notably as practiced by D'Gary, but also by Monique’s brother, Dozzy, a brilliant guitarist, the founder of Njava and unfortunately a sociopath. 

To give the man his due I’m here because of him. In 1999 I got a call from his then girlfriend, a Norwegian. To this day I don’t know how she got my number. But she needed a copywriter to produce a website text about Njava’s first album, Vetse, which was about to be released on EMI. Not knowing the least thing about Madagascar or its music I went over to their apartment. Listening to an advance copy of the CD I was totally blown away, not least of all by the singer. They liked my webtext so much they hired me to write the album liner notes. The rest is history.

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Teta was great. Listening to him play it sure sounded like Dozzy, but with blues licks thrown in. (Click “Ecouter” and “Renitra”.) But the real discovery was his drummer, Ndriana. He was the polar opposite of Jimmy, our show-off power drummer. A little guy (expressed in his nickname “Kely”) and unprepossessing, Ndriana looked like he was moonlighting from his day job at Radio Shack. His kit consisted of a big bass drum, a very loose shallow snare, a hi-hat and one ride cymbal with a chunk missing.  He began really softly, almost inaudibly, which needless to say is very unusual for a drummer. He used brushes a lot at first.

The more he played, the more impressed Monique and I got. Not only could he perfectly handle high-speed tsapiky and the complicated two-against-three polyrhythm you hear in a lot of southern Malagasy music. He had an astounding funk groove that picked up where Clyde Stubblefield left off, not to mention something suspiciously close to New Orleans second line. He could also really, really rock. Yet he had that Joey Baron trick of making the drums sing – even on that crappy kit. Most amazingly, he was somehow able to blend all these elements together into a seamless flowing whole. Weirdly, the whole time he was doing this he was sitting slumped back against the wall, something I’ve only seen drummers do in between songs.

At the end of the long set when he was summoned to our table (which is how it works when you're big in Madagascar), I raved about his playing, pumping his hand up and down like a maniac. He said, “You’re Monika Njava’s producer, aren’t you?” I suddenly felt bad. He was thinking, “This dude could be my ticket to fame, fortune and a decent drum set,” when in fact I had nothing to offer him.

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I unburdened myself to Monique on the drive home. She said, “I get three of these a day on Facebook, people wanting me to launch their career.” I don’t know what it will be, but if I can think of anything to do to launch Ndriana’s career, I will.