Salegy is an exciting 6/8 dance rhythm which is heard in roots music all over Madagascar. Most of the eighteen different Malagasy tribes have their own version, played on their local traditional instruments. You'll hear it from groups of young boys on street corners with kabosy, the little local equivalents of guitar with partial frets and unwound bicycle brake cables for strings, and korintsana - bamboo tubes or tin cans full of rice grains - for percussion. Or perhaps it will be played on the valiha or marovany, Madagascar's unique zithers. Nowadays, since the end of the 1960s, the style is usually associated with electric instruments and is Madagascar's local guitar band dance music just as benga is to Kenya or soukous to Zaire. Many people believe that modern Salegy and its relatives like Watcha Watcha originated in the North and Northwest of Madagascar but that's not strictly the case. It's just that Salegy with electric instruments became more common in those areas because they had ports like Diego Suarez and Mahajanga which in colonial days, had a lot of French military personnel who enjoyed partying. In the late '70s and early '80s, hundreds of 45 rpm singles of Salegy, Watcha Watcha, Basesa and other Malagasy dance rhythms were released on the two local labels, DiscoMad and Kalamba, some reputedly selling over 60,000 copies. These are now increasingly rare as the pressing plants closed during Madagascar's slow economic collapse in the '80s, though a search around the markets will still unearth a few~very scratchy masterpieces. More recently, there seems to have been something of a revival with the '90s seeing a small explosion of local cassette releases by artists and bands like Tianjama, Mily Clement, Lazan' Maroantsetra and Jaojoby.