Rajery - known on his native isle as the "prince of the valiha" - had often thought about fusing his chosen instrument with other strings. But the idea for the 3 Ma project really took root when he performed at the 2006 edition of the Timitar festival, organised in the Moroccan city of Agadir. It was listening to one of his co-performers at the festival, the Malian artist Toumani Diabaté, that triggered Rajery's desire to fuse the sound of the Madagascan valiha (a tubular zither) with that of the kora (a traditional harp-lute from West Africa).

A few months after this decisive encounter, Rajery went on to perform a live concert with the Moroccan oud (Arab lute) virtuoso Driss El Maloumi and it was at this point that he realised that his fusion project for strings would sound even better with three musicians rather than two. Unfortunately, Toumani Diabaté's schedule was too busy to allow him to work on 3 Ma so Ballaké Sissoko, another talented kora-player from Mali, stepped in to take his place. The trio got together in Madagascar to begin work on the project in December 2006 thanks to funding from the French cultural centre in Antananarivo.

When it came to putting Rajery's original fusion idea into practice, the three musicians discovered that first they had to find a technical means of playing together. The Madagascan valiha star explains that "It wasn't at all easy, from a practical point of view, to find a musical middle ground." The problem was further complicated by the fact that Rajery's instrument is chromatic whilst those of his partners are diatonic and tuned differently. The trio spent many long hours listening to each other play and, as a result, worked on ways of changing their fingering and adapting their playing styles to invent a common language. Once string harmony had been well and truly established, Rajery and his partners flew off to record an album together on the neighbouring island of Reunion.

While 3 MA is the result of an intensive process of musical research, the musicians have managed to avoid making their album overly experimental-sounding or inaccessible. Right from the opening notes of Anfass listeners are drawn into a rich and evocative tapestry of sound, the plucked strings transporting us to the heart of North Africa, then Mali, then Madagascar. Rajery, Ballaké Sissoko and Driss El Maloumi each take turns playing the melody line, none of them attempting to hog the spotlight or outdo his partners. On the contrary, the trio put themselves at one another's service, their overriding aim being to bring out the full potential of each composition. Outstanding tracks such as Toufoula and the new reworked version of Vero (an instrumental which originally featured on Rajery's solo album Sofera) smash all notions of musical boundaries and cultural borders. Indeed, 3 MA is an album where the fusion sounds so natural and the exchange between the musicians so full of complicity that you can almost feel the smiles the musicians must have exchanged in the studio as they played.

With the record industry increasingly obsessed by profit margins and risk limitation, it takes a certain kind of courage to branch out and try something genuinely innovative in times like these. But that risk has more than paid off for Rajery, Ballaké Sissoko and Driss El Maloumi. 3 MA is not only a bold, daring and challenging album, it also makes very enjoyable listening indeed !