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TOh western ears, the music seems strange and familiar. Her mood ranges from sensual and haunting to upbeat and vibrant. The soulful western tones are audible, but the overall impression is distinctive and inimitably Ethiopian. Now a rich musical export, the evolution of “Ethio-jazz” as this hybrid genre is known, and its growing worldwide renown are a story of back and forth migration and alchemical fusion of ideas. The dramatic saga involves political upheaval, accidental epiphanies, a series of tenacious and inspired individuals, and Hollywood.
Today, says Samuel Yirga, pianist and composer, Ethio-jazz is a vocation and a way of life for many Ethiopian musicians. In 2020 there were new releases from stars of the genre, including Mulatu Astatke (pictured), a visionary percussionist and keyboardist, and Hailu Mergia, an accordionist and bandleader. “Sons of Ethiopia”, a 1984 cult classic by the band Admas that mixes pop, funk and jazz, has just been reissued. However, the history of the mesmeric sound began almost a century ago, in Jerusalem.
Visiting that city in 1924, the leader who would later become Emperor Haile Selassie was greeted by a marching band, which was made up of orphaned survivors of the Armenian genocide. He was impressed and quickly invited the musicians to live in Ethiopia, along with the band’s leader, Kevork Nalbandian. There the group was known as “Arba Lijoch”, Amharic for “The forty children”.
Arba Lijoch’s arrival in Addis Ababa was a revolutionary moment in the country’s cultural history. An indigenous musical tradition based on stringed instruments began to transform into one that revolved around great wind bands. Nalbandian went on to compose the Ethiopian national anthem and teach musicians from across the country. Later his nephew, Nerses Nalbandian, took up his mission, training performers, including future giants of modern Ethiopian music such as Alemayehu Eshete and Tilahun Gessesse, both renowned singers. In Addis Ababa, says Aramazt Kalayjian, a filmmaker, the young Nalbandian is known as “the godfather” of modern Ethiopian music.
Music of the world
This formative period was the opening to the fundamental career of Mulatu, the next key figure in history. Unusually for the time, in the late 1950s, Mulatu was educated not in Africa but in Wales, and later studied music in London and Boston. But it was in the mid-1960s in New York, where he met John Coltrane and other musicians, that he perfected a new sound he called Ethio-jazz, a marriage between the various pentatonic scales that define more traditional Ethiopian music and the type which are the basis of most western music. The result, as Ermanno Becchis, a producer, sums up, “is sinuously scientific, but truly magical.”
Mulatu returned to Ethiopia and, in the late 1960s and 1970s, his capital earned the nickname “Swinging Addis”. Nightlife flourished in a musical golden age, as did pioneering record labels like Amha Records. “People were having the time of their lives,” recalls Amha Eshete, the label’s founder, in a documentary about the time. Then, in 1974, the Ethiopian monarchy was overthrown by a Marxist junta known as the Derg, which imposed new rules and curfews.
“Derg policies shut down most musical performances in Ethiopia between 1974 and 1991 and cut off contact with popular European and American musical styles,” explains Kay Kaufman Shelemay of Harvard University. Many artists went into exile; the pop-up scene was bypassed. Or so it seemed.
Like its birth, the resurgence of Ethio-jazz occurred through travel and serendipity. At a party in Poitiers in the mid-1980s, Francis Falceto, a French musicologist and producer, heard the recorded voice of Mahmoud Ahmed, an Ethiopian singer. Derg’s regime was “a musical nightmare,” laments Falceto, the next hero in history. But in 1991 the junta was overthrown, and Falceto was able to embark on his self-proclaimed mission to share modern Ethiopian music with the world. In 1997 he released the first volume of an anthology entitled “Éthiopiques”.
Thirty more volumes have followed; the next, number 32, will be called “Nalbandian the Ethiopian” and will commemorate Nerses Nalbandian, says Falceto. Although, according to himself, he is “getting old and a little tired”, he hopes to release four or five more volumes. But his series has already transformed the fortunes of Ethiopian artists. The fourth volume, with Mulatu, definitely put Ethio-jazz on the world map. After its release, Jim Jarmusch, a film director, used Mulatu’s music in the soundtrack to “Broken Flowers,” an award-winning 2005 film. The film, says Harvard’s Kaufman Shelemay, brought Ethio-jazz to the ears of an even wider international audience.
For some outsiders, Ethiopia is predominantly associated with political struggles – such as the bloody military action recently launched by the government in the Tigray region – and humanitarian crises. But another version of the country still vibrates from the bars of Addis Ababa to the stages of Glastonbury. Hip-hop artists like Kanye West have sampled Ethio-jazz on their tracks; the country’s music schools continue to produce innovative performers. And a new generation of expatriate musicians has helped popularize a genre rooted in Africa but cultivated around the world. “For people who are just getting close to it,” says Berhana, a singer living in the United States, “I love that it serves as an introduction to a music and culture that are so profound. ■
This article appeared in the Books and Arts section of the print edition under the title “The Rhythm Continues.”
