Village life led directly to music for young Philibert Rabezaza. Growing up in Madagascar's central highlands--home of the Merina people--he began playing the traditional, metal, end-blown flute, sodina, at age seven. Like his father and uncle, he played for cattle as he herded. He also distinguished himself as an excellent dancer while still a boy. "I was very skilled in everything," he boasted late in life, "the hand twists, the steps, the shoulder swings."

This background came in handy when Rabezaza moved to the Isotry neighborhood of Antananarivo in 1945. Isotry was and is the stronghold of Madagascar's competitive, multi-disciplinary theater in the round, hiragasy. Isotry is also a poor neighborhood, plagued by flooding during the rainy season. Distinguishing himself in hiragasy performances, Rabezaza soon formed his first group, a quartet, and took on the stage name Rakoto Frah.

Mastery of the sodina was Rakoto Frah's main claim to fame, but when his group began performing at famadihana ceremonies, he also began to blossom as a composer. Famadihana, literally "turning the dead," involves exhuming the bones of ancestors, throwing a massive party to make their spirits happy, and then reburying them. "When we have a burial famadihana, it's not a performance," said Malagasy folk/pop bandleader Rossy, who accompanied Rakoto Frah on his one United States tour in 1993. "Everybody dances together. It costs a lot of money. Many families spend their whole economies for this event. You must feed all the people who come. You give them rice with many oils in it. People must have oil everywhere when they leave the fest. You take the ancestors from their graves. You wrap them in lamba mena [colorful woven fabric], hand made and very expensive. You can do it near the grave or you can take the bones and play music to go to your village or your house. A rich family can have a thousand people, and the ceremony can go on for a week."

Rakoto Frah, leading as many as 20 flute players, drummers, singers, and dancers was the first to fill out the standard famadihana musical repertoire with songs of his own, as well as radio hits transformed for the occasion. Near the end of his life, Rakoto Frah estimated that he had composed 770 pieces for famadihana. Rakoto Frah's national importance was publicly recognized when his picture appeared on Madagascar's 1000 franc note. Rakoto Frah toured in Europe and Japan during the 1990s. His one visit to the United States followed his participation in Henry Kaiser and David Lindley's A World Out of Time project. Accompanied by Kaiser and Rossy, Rakoto Frah--by then a wiry, playful old man--boasted to his New York audience that he had put aside his aluminum ski-pole sodina for a sturdier item he made from a microphone stand in California. He then charmed the crowd in Washington Square Church with whimsical love songs, delicate, quirky dancing, a toothless smile, and most of all, fluttering flute melodies woven unerringly into Rossy's and Kaiser's accompaniment. Rakoto Frah's darting flute lines actually won him accolades that night from Ornette Coleman, who stopped backstage after the show to pronounce Rakoto Frah "the best phraser on the planet."

Contributed by: Banning Eyre