Bwarouz (2002)
14 tracks, 64 minutes
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The first time I ever heard of maloya or Danyèl Waro was seeing him on stage at WOMAD in 2011 at about 1 in the morning. I was absolutely awe-struck. Here was a little man with crazy hair, large, strong glasses and strange, jerky dancing (a function of his playing the square kayamb rattle) looking very much like Not a Musician, but with the most captivating voice. The music was unknown to me, and I only had a vague idea even of where La Réunion was (it’s a small island in the Indian Ocean to the east of Madagascar, officially part of France), but there were so many connections with music all over the world that were pinging inside my brain. It was an amazing show, and I had to hear more – immediately after the end of his ovation, I dashed off to the CD tent to grab whatever they had. They were closed, so I had to wait until the next day, but that’s not the point. I ended up getting this album, Bwarouz, and the later Aou Amwin from 2010, and both are fantastic.
Right from the first moments of the opening track, ‘Boulouze’, you can hear why I like it so much. It starts with the shuffling rhythm of the kayamb, which you can tell even in the space of a few seconds is ever so slightly limping behind the beat. Then Danyèl’s beautiful voice comes in. It’s a curious voice, fragile but powerful at the same time. It’s high-pitched and reedy, and he wavers in his upper range. He sounds like he is always a fraction away from his voice cracking and giving out altogether, but of course it never does. The power comes not in the form of beefiness, although he can belt it out when he needs to; instead, it is a power that comes from a sense of deep wisdom held within. It all suffuses his voice with a capacity to acutely represent emotion, even to those who don’t speak Creole or French.
The music itself helps, too. It’s mostly a percussion-and-voice music, which means that the melody is super-important in driving the emotions of the piece. There’s actually a feature in the most recent edition of Songlines magazine, a beginner’s guide to maloya; in it, the writer Bastiaan Springer says that ‘maloya is often called the blues of La Réunion, although, musically speaking, there are hardly any similarities with the American blues, except its call-and-response structure,’ but I think that’s a bit of a mad statement to make. Just listen to Danyèl sing in ‘Boulouze’! Of course it is not exactly like the blues – the two styles developed thousands of miles apart from very different origins – and the way the melody is constructed is not like blues…but it is absolutely full of that blues emotion. The personality of blues music really comes from the blue notes – notes that are ‘between’ the standard notes of a scale, quartertones almost, and maloya is absolutely full of blue notes. You’ll know them when you hear them: they’re the notes that sound as if they’re pulling on your heart, aching to be resolved.
And I’ve not even mentioned the harmonies yet! The harmonies are used in an interesting way: usually when the rest of the band join Danyèl in his singing, they all sing the same notes in unison, but every so often, one singer will break away and make a simple harmony – maybe just a minor third over the last couple of notes in a long phrase. It’s so simple, but it gets me every time.
I’ve gone on a lot, and I’ve only really been talking about the very first song on the album. And it’s a great one, but it’s not alone on the album; where each of the tracks brings something new but all of them have that same power and fragility that Danyèl’s voice brings. In terms of sheer emotional reaction to one person’s voice, I would have to say that Danyèl Waro’s is definitely one of my favourite in all music. Listen to this and pay attention, but prepare to get your heart broken along the way.
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