Tarika Is in Good Voice, but Message Isn’t Heard

“Son Egal,” the new album by Malagasy folk-pop group Tarika, has an agenda as ambitious as anything Peter Gabriel or Bruce Springsteen has attempted.

Singer-songwriter Hanitra and her four bandmates combine the traditional styles of Madagascar, off the east coast of Africa, with a melodic accessibility and folk-rock vigor that could make Tarika a hit on adult album alternative radio if given the chance.

More ambitious still is the album’s thematic thrust: Tarika wants to foster the forgiveness needed to heal historic wounds embittering the Malagasy people, but it also is determined to kindle outrage at the domestic corruption and outside economic exploitation that Hanitra sees as evils paralyzing her nation.

Given its subject matter, and its ensemble skills as a terrific vocal harmony group that is also a crack string band and a polyrhythmic dance machine, Tarika might be qualified to attempt concerts on the epic, music-that-matters scale of a Springsteen, a Gabriel or a Bob Marley. But a lovely Saturday night in the grassy, mission-style courtyard of the San Juan Capistrano Regional Library proved not to be the time or place for it.

Tarika touched on its grand themes during a too brief, 55-minute early set, but its demeanor and choice of material signaled that the group was there not to confront, but to delight.

After a somewhat circumspect opening, Tarika loosened up and was indeed delightful down a home stretch in which band members flashed pleased smiles at each other, melodies lilted and grabbed hold, and rhythms stepped with a light bounce while packing a sure, probing thrust.

Hanitra, a beautiful woman with a commanding presence, tried in her song introductions to convey the meanings of lyrics she and her cohorts sang in Malagasy. But her comments on her country’s corruption (“politically, a lot of things go wrong in Madagascar. . . . We’re in desperate [condition]”) and on the need to end the historic hatred between Madagascar and Senegal (begun in 1947 when colonialist France brought in Senegalese troops to bloodily put down a revolt) were perhaps inevitably sketchy and insufficient to compel strong feeling in an American audience.

Hanitra needed to take the time to turn thumbnail sketches into vivid narratives, investing them with a storyteller’s sense of drama that would make them compelling to people who couldn’t find Madagascar on a map.

“Avelo (Ghost),” a dark, weighty song with a scratching, reggae-like rhythm, dealt with those “desperate” domestic circumstances. But Hanitra’s sister, Noro, who handles some of the lead vocals, didn’t muster the portent-laden tension of the album version.

Perhaps out of politeness to hosts, Tarika omitted performing “Aza Misy Miteniteny (Don’t Say Anything),” the fiery, militant chant piece that ends “Son Egal.” It lampoons the First World powers--including, pointedly, the United States--that it holds responsible for its homeland’s lot.

If Public Enemy hit like a ton on its best raps, this Malagasy rap hits like a ton-and-a-half; hearing it chanted in a courtyard just up the block from the Mission San Juan Capistrano, a crumbled symbol of, among other things, colonial power’s reach, would have been an experience--although, for any American clued in to the song’s content, not necessarily an untroubled one.

“Sonegal,” about Tarika’s hopes for Malagasy reconciliation with the Senegalese, was one of the show’s highlights, as the biting, chanted attack of African vocal tradition alternated with the strong sense of soaring pop melody that makes Tarika not much of a stretch for listeners who enjoy the classic folk-rock of ‘60s vintage Jefferson Airplane or Fairport Convention.

Tarika’s instrumental attack was strong all around. Donne plucked the traditional string instruments, including the valiha, a strung bamboo tube that produced a glistening tone like a dulcimer, only with more heft, and the marovany, a bulky, hollowed-out wooden rectangle with strings on each side. At times it twanged like an electric sitar.

Ny Ony played conventional and Malagasy-designed acoustic guitars, nimbly picking long, repeating rhythmic figures. Bassist Solo was the band’s mainspring, able to shadow the guitarist’s fleet moves, or to serve as the foundation of Tarika’s bubbly yet inexorable rhythms.

Sharp showmanship (including synchronized dance steps) and infectious rhythms dominated the show’s celebratory closing songs, which had the audience up and dancing.

There is no question that Tarika, a dynamo of talent, can get Western audiences moving; the group’s challenge is to find a way to translate its globally resonant subject matter in a way that will leave them moved.