The advance team for the Afropop Adventure to Madagascar has arrived in the capital, Antananarivo (Tana) to a warm welcome. Banning Eyre flew in from Zimbabwe via Johannesburg and who should he meet at the Jo'berg airport but Eusebe Jaojoby, the leader of the most popular salegy band in Madagascar. They were returning from gigs in South Africa, and Jaojoby invited Afropop to their gig in Tana that weekend and to his home.

I arrived in Tana two days later after 36 hours of traveling from New York, and reached Hanitra Rasoanaivo, leader of Tarika and our guest host for the Afropop tour, on her cel phone as she was driving her 4x4 to visit her sick mum. Hanitra (pronounced "Anch") welcomed me warmly to Madagascar and talked excitedly about the roots musicians she had lined up for Afropoppers to meet when we drive from Tana to Tulear on the southwest coast of the island. I could tell right away, she's got the Afropop spirit. Big time. This is going to be one unforgettable adventure!

I feel disoriented here. Am I in Asia? Africa? The High Andes? The faces here on the high plateau in the center of the island are mostly the Merina people of Indonesian and Polynesian descent. But you also see very dark people originally from the more African coast, as well as Indians, Chinese, vazhas (whites) and mixtures of all the above. Very beautiful. And the land looks like it could be southeast Asia, settled in medieval European hilltop fortress fashion. The trip from the airport passes through bright green rice paddies. In the distance are the hills of Tana, stacked with red-roofed houses. The architecture is quite attractive: two and three story pastel colored stone and wood residences. Cobblestone streets wind up and down this hilly city. The traffic and car pollution are terrible. The rag tag poverty of street kids begging and people sleeping on the sidewalk is sobering.

That night we go to a fancy dinner club where Jaojoby is performing. He's known as the "King of Salegy", which is a fast 6/8 dance music from the northwest of the country. His band is a family business. His wife Claudine sings. His two young daughters dance. And his 17 year old son, Lucas, plays lead guitar. The trap drummer is the true marathon man of the evening. The keyboard player creates a remarkable accordion sound. Jaojoby plays the social butterfly. He sings his hit songs, then turns the microphone over to one of his singers and goes out into the crowd to socialize. The crowd is mostly vazha (whites), and Jaojoby's daughter later calls them "snobby" because they just sit and watch, but later on in the evening, more Malagasy stream onto the dancefloor to dance the hipgrinding salegy dance, and sing along to Jaojoby's hits.

The next day, Sunday, Hanitra picks us up at our hotel, and we head out to the hiragasy in a very poor neighborhood of Tana. I had heard recordings of hiragasy from previous Afropop reporter from Madagascar but was not prepared for the sheer visual and emotional power of this musical-dramatic-speechifying presentation. We pay 500 Francs Malagache (about ten cents) and enter a walled compound. An audience of about 500 people sits on four sides of an uneven grassy surface and listen attentively as the headman of the group, a white-haired guy in his 70s delivers a thank you and greetings speech in a loud gruff chanted voice. He's surrounded by about seven musicians in bright red tunics with white sashes and raffia hats. Three play violins and the others play marching band style drums. The eighteen or so "players" in this hiragasy group stand up on cue and spread out on the four sides of the performance space, facing outwards to the audience. In unison, and in catchy rhythm punctuated by the drummers, the men and wonen sing a story. The men wear red tunics like the musicians. The slight women in long orange dresses with jet black straight hair pulled back in buns look they could be part of a Javanese dance troupe. The troupe gesture with fighting and digging moves. The crowd erupts in laughter and applause throughout. There are no microphones here. The players--from teenagers to older folks--have to project forcefully.

Hanitra tells us that the theme of one piece makes fun of lawyers. The but of jokes around the world apparently! For their finale, four young boys aged six to ten do a humorous martial dance and shout out to the accompaniment of trumpets. Hanitra says this is the headman's choreography of the tragic events surrounding the 1947 uprising against the French in which some 80,000 people died. For the last move is--you guessed it--they all fall down! Stay tuned for the next dispatch and images from Afropop's Adventure in Madagascar!