Scenta.co.uk, UK
May 18 2008
Out of Africa
‘There have been very difficult times. Harsh times, when it was
frankly hell to be here, but some of us were lucky and survived. Thank
God. Now this place’ – Alemayehu Eshete gestures towards the
shimmering sprawl of Addis Ababa below the terrace where we are
sitting – ‘is finally getting noticed.’
On cue, a giant truck laden with bricks and builders gives a mighty
honk and rumbles past in an evil cloud of dust and diesel, en route to
one of the many construction sites springing up in Ethiopia’s
capital. Equally on cue, a flock of goats trots anarchically past,
whipped into unruly order by their owner, forcing a shining Toyota 4×4
to a halt. Addis is a city of contrasts, where the future and the past
rub constantly, uncomfortably, against each other.
The same might be said of Alemayehu himself. At 60 years of age the
singer has lived out a career that has taken him from teenage Elvis
impersonator to national stardom as Ethiopia’s answer to James Brown,
from singing under duress for North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung in the
Eighties to his trans-American tours of today, playing for the booming
Ethiopian communities of Washington DC, Atlanta and
beyond. Twenty-first century Ethiopia, it transpires, extends way
beyond Africa.
Later this month, Ashete’s career begins a more unexpected chapter
when he and three other veterans from Addis’s ‘Golden Age’ play
London’s Barbican as part of the venue’s ‘Groove Nations’
programme. Then the quartet headline Glastonbury’s Saturday night jazz
stage. Alemayehu declares himself unphased at the prospect of wowing
the Glasto faithful – after what he and his country have endured, you
sense he’s unshockable – but he admits that he and his colleagues are
pleasantly astonished to find the music they pioneered in the early
Seventies is now in first-world vogue.
And what vogue. The Very Best of Éthiopiques was 2007’s cult hit,
swathed in press plaudits, endorsed by Robert Plant and Elvis Costello
– who hailed its ‘soulful, sorrowful and joyful music’ and ‘defiant
human spirit’ – and widely tipped to ‘do for Ethiopia what the Buena
Vista Social Club did for Cuba’. A tall order indeed.
A mixture of rugged funk, mesmeric jazz, blousy soul and harp-drenched
folk, the 28 tracks of The Very Best are distilled from the series of
23 Éthiopiques albums that is the brainchild of Francis Falceto, a
French promoter turned musical curator. Falceto’s series and its Very
Best microcosm capture the flowering of Ethiopian pop during the
fading years of Emperor Haile Selassie’s reign, a brief, gilded age
before a bloodthirsty Communist military junta closed down the country
for 18 years, silencing its music in the process.
Today Addis is once more a boom town. Downtown, mammoth new buildings
are rising, the concrete skeletons of new five-star hotels sheathed in
rickety wooden scaffolding. The city’s ramshackle roads are likewise
being upgraded and carry a surprising number of flashy Merecedes
saloons and Japanese jeeps alongside flotillas of rickety Lada taxis
and bright blue minibuses spewing out black clouds of half-digested
diesel, pictures of Arsenal or Barcelona FC stuck in their windows.
Where all this smart money is coming from is something no one seems
able or willing to say. Dubai is mentioned, and the cheerful Chinese
businessmen in the city’s pizza parlours tell another part of the
story, but the principal source of the new wealth seems to be
first-world aid. Not the humanitarian aid that pulled the country’s
northern provinces out of famine back in Live Aid days, but
politically inspired investment. Ethiopia is, after all, a devoutly
Christian country in a region where Islamic fundamentalism is on the
rise.
As headquarters to the African Union, Addis is already the de facto
political capital of Africa, a place where business is done among
governments, aid agencies and pressure groups. How much the city’s
burgeoning role will benefit its endless shanty towns remains to be
seen, but some of the political gloss is already rubbing off on the
city’s culture. Last year Beyoncé Knowles chose Addis for the opening
date of her world tour – at the city’s cavernous Millennium Hall. VIP
tickets cost 4,000 Birra (£200), a colossal sum for most Ethiopians,
though much of the audience were students with free tickets.
The signs of a musical and artistic revival don’t stop there. Out
beyond the old leper hospital on the city’s fringes I visit a spacious
art gallery opened last year, whose paintings are selling for a
healthy £2,000 apiece. Downtown there are swish, cosmopolitan bars and
jazz venues like Club Alize, alongside the rootsier tedjbets, drinking
holes where all manner of bluesy, folky music is played. Some of this
activity is driven by the return of exiles and expatriates, especially
from the USA. Various figures are bandied around for the number of
Ethiopians in the States, with a million as a mean average, of whom
around 100,000 are resident in Washington DC alone.
Though the music you hear pumping from the tape decks of lorries and
taxis might include the odd blast of American R&B or rap, it’s local
stars who dominate with tunes laced with synths but still chiming with
the odd harmonies of East Africa – pin-up Teddy Afro, or the hugely
popular Gossaye Tesfaye.
For the moment, though, it is the music of the past that is attracting
the attention of the West. Éthiopiques gathers an array of talents,
among them singer Mahmoud Ahmed, who lifted a BBC World award last
year, Alemayehu Eshete, saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya, and
‘Ethio-jazz’ bandleader Mulatu Astatke. It’s these four who are
heading for Europe, backed by the US jazz troupe Ether Orchestra.
The album’s totem tracks probably belong to Mulatu, not least because
his spellbinding music featured heavily in the soundtrack to Jim
Jarmusch’s 2005 comedy-drama Broken Flowers. Jarmusch had become
entranced by Astake’s discordant brass and quavering keyboards after
hearing the Éthiopiques 4 release dedicated to him. So entranced that
the director searched out Astatke in New York, then wrote an Ethiopian
character into the movie to accommodate his music.
Astatke, a solemn, well-spoken 64-year-old, is a very different
personality to the effervescent Eshete. I catch up with him before a
triumphant show at the Cargo club in London, where he is brilliantly
backed by local jazzers the Heliocentrics. Coming from a well-off
family, he was packed off to boarding school in Wrexham, where he
first developed an interest in music, learning trumpet and
clarinet. After moving to London to study music at Trinity College, he
became interested in classical and jazz, and was quickly sucked into
the capital’s musical life, playing for Latin bandleader Edmundo Ros
and absorbing Soho’s jazz scene. ‘It was a thrilling time,’ he
says. ‘I became great friends with [club owner] Ronnie Scott and met a
lot of talented players – Tubby Hayes in particular, who played both
tenor sax and vibes. It was Tubby who first inspired me to take up
vibes.’
After a spell at Berklee College in Boston, Astatke founded the
Ethiopian Quintet in New York, making his first album in 1966 and
returning home at the end of the decade. It was the era of ‘Swinging
Addis’. An ageing Haile Selassie still ruled the country like a feudal
monarch but the Ethiopian capital had loosened up under the sway of
the younger generation and the tides of internationalism. Alongside
Ethiopian music the state radio broadcast soul music, much of it
introduced via young American peace corps.
In Addis’s downtown hotels resident big bands in crisp tuxedos pumped
out a brash fusion of American soul and Amharic pop for a
sophisticated audience – then, as now, Addis had an affluent upper
class and was an international capital. In the new mood of youthful
discontent, even the state monopoly on recording and importing records
found itself challenged by an uppity 24-year-old record shop owner,
Amha Eshèté. Recording in his back room and sending his tapes to India
for pressing, Amha Records’ first release was by Alemayehu Eshete.
For Alemayehu, speaking on a hotel terrace in Addis, where he still
lives, such times are both distant and oddly present. ‘We got away
with our defiance,’ says Alemayehu, ‘then the Philips label, who had
the monopoly, got in on the act, some others too.’
As lead singer with the Police Band, Alemayehu was already a star
turn. Not that he was actually in the police force – Ethiopia’s music
scene had been largely generated through the various marching bands
that had begun in the Forties on the Emperor’s orders. On a visit to
Turkey, Selassie had been greeted and impressed by an Armenian brass
band and had promptly inaugurated his own musical strike
force. Armenian instructors were drafted in and a host of official
bands founded, the most eminent being the Imperial Bodyguard
Band. Later, the Bodyguard band would fall from grace, when several
members were implicated in 1960’s attempted coup.
‘The bands would hire singers, players and dancers,’ relates
Alemayehu, who was well known even at school for his cover versions of
Elvis Presley. ‘You can’t start from nothing, you have to start from
something, and I had watched a lot of Elvis movies. I dressed like an
American, grew my hair, sang "Jailhouse Rock" and "Teddy Bear" –
sometimes we would do "Strangers in the Night".’ At this he laughs and
gives a creditable croon. ‘But the moment that I started singing
Amharic songs my popularity shot up.’
By the time Alemayehu was making records, James Brown had replaced
Elvis as his principal influence. ‘Sam Cooke, Brook Benton, Bobby
Bland, Nat King Cole… I loved them all, but James was the greatest.’
Listening to the Éthiopiques series, it’s easy to think that black
America had more of an influence on Ethiopia than turns out to be the
case. It’s not much of a step, for example, from the cosmic jazz of
Sun Ra to the mysterious sounds of Mulatu Astatke, or from the primal
free jazz saxophone of Albert Ayler to the visceral warrior wails of
Getatchew Mekurya. After all, in the era when Addis briefly
flourished, black America was turning increasingly to the ‘motherland’
for inspiration, sporting Afro haircuts and dashikis, its jazz
champions cutting records called ‘Black Nile’ or ‘Home is Africa’.
For confirmation, I hand Alemayehu a new Blue Note compilation,
African Rhythms: Afrocentric Homages to a Spiritual Homeland,
featuring the likes of Lee Morgan and Wayne Shorter. After inspecting
it he shakes his head, bemused. ‘We weren’t aware of this at all,’ he
says.
Even Mulatu, a sophisticated international, turns out to have been
unaware of the rippling electronic keyboards of Sun Ra that so much
resemble his own. His principal western inspirations were, he says,
the orchestral styles of Gil Evans and Duke Ellington – the latter he
famously met and worked with when the Ellington band was touring
Africa, staying a few days in Addis. Mulatu wrote an arrangement for
the Duke, using Ethiopian notation. ‘He was surprised – he said he
wasn’t expecting an African to come up with something like that.’
In a country where the voice rules music and lyrics count for a great
deal (often saying one thing and meaning another), Mulatu’s
instrumental music has never been especially popular, though his
arrangements for others, notably singer Tlahoun Gèssèssè, are much
admired. Mulatu was responsible for introducing instruments like
Fender keyboards, wah-wah pedals, vibes, organs. A musical scholar who
is a fellow at Harvard, Mulatu likes to talk technically about the
distinctive qualities of Ethiopian music and its use of the five-note
pentatonic scale rather than the West’s eight-note scale. He’ll
compare the diminished scales used by Ethiopian tribes to Debussy’s,
and explain how he melded chants from the Coptic Church, which traces
its origins back to at least the third century, into his arrangements.
All Ethiopians, it seems, have a well-developed sense of their
country’s uniqueness, be it in their music, religion, language
(Amharic is a one-off) or history. Of all the African nations,
Ethiopia alone remained independent of the European colonial land grab
of the 19th century, keeping its ancient royal line intact down to the
overthrow of Haile Selassie in the revolution of 1974.
Selassie’s downfall remains an ambiguous moment for many
Ethiopians. Though widely admired by outsiders as a symbol of African
stability and even modernity, at home the Emperor was an unpopular
autocrat – one of the biggest hits of 1973 was ‘I Can’t Take It
Anymore’, a political slogan disguised as a love song.
‘We couldn’t be open in what we sang,’ says Alemayehu, ‘because there
was no democracy. Most of the people were against the government
because the law wasn’t straight. The king had become old and ministers
were just doing what they liked. Still, it was 100 per cent better
than what came after…’
Swinging Addis stopped rocking abruptly in 1974 when widespread street
protests and anti-government strikes opened the way for a military
coup. Headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Communist junta – the
‘Derg’ – imprisoned Selassie, cracked down on dissenters and imposed a
night-time curfew that silenced Addis’s nightlife. Amid civil unrest
at home, the Derg pursued old enmities against its neighbours –
Eritrea, Somalia, Tigray – coming close to defeat in the process, and
being saved only by massive military intervention from Soviet and
Cuban forces.
For the next couple of years, Ethiopia was plunged into a campaign of
‘Red Terror’ as dissent was ruthlessly suppressed. Military and
civilian murder squads roamed the country eradicating ‘enemies of the
revolution’, and thousands died or were imprisoned as Mengistu
established a ‘Socialist Paradise’. In reality the country was turned
into a prison and Mengistu into a Stalinist caricature of an emperor
who was by then dead, his body buried beneath a toilet in the palace
from which Mengistu now held sway.
Many musicians were among those who fled into exile. Others remained,
though unable to perform more than the odd state-sponsored show or
sneak the occasional cassette recording through the cultural
clampdown. ‘That time was hell,’ says Alemayehu, simply. ‘A lot of
people were detained and killed, though not me, I was still popular
and even some of the Derg liked me.’
Alemayehu found himself pressed into state service, under government
orders to play prestige shows in other African countries or on
occasion for allies like Cuba, Russia and North Korea. ‘I was ordered
to sing a song in Korean for Kim Il Sung, which I learned, though I
had no idea what I was singing. At the theatre people stood up and
started clapping for no apparent reason – it was because the president
had left his home and was on his way to the show. The applause didn’t
stop until he was sat down.’
The 10th anniversary of the Derg’s accession to power in 1984 was
accompanied by lavish, Soviet-style celebrations – parades, gymnastic
displays, triumphal arches and monuments – though these were soon
overshadowed by the calamitous famine that gripped the country’s
north. The extent of the tragedy, in which hundreds of thousands of
peasants and refugees starved, was at first concealed by
Mengistu. When the world’s television screens eventually revealed the
unfolding catastrophe, a deluge of humanitarian aid flowed in, led by
Band Aid and the following summer’s Live Aid concert.
Though drought and a failed harvest had much to do with the famine,
Mengistu was also culpable. Agricultural collectivisation and the
scorched earth tactics used by the military against Tigrayan
independence fighters also played their part in the tragedy, while the
£150m raised by Live Aid was roughly equivalent to the sum lavished by
Mengistu on his anniversary celebrations.
For the outside world, the words ‘Ethiopia’ and ‘famine’ became
inseparable. For Francis Falceto, the force behind Éthiopiques, this
has been a tragedy of a lesser order. ‘The images of the famine on
people’s TV screens implanted the idea that Ethiopia was a desert
where people die of hunger, whereas most of the country is green,
fertile uplands. I wanted to show that Ethiopians were a cultured
people, not incompetent beggars who couldn’t feed themselves. I wanted
the Éthiopiques series to help break this cliche and change the West’s
perception.’
A quixotic figure who ‘has aways been drawn to unknown and
experimental music’, the 56-year-old Falceto is an eloquent and
inspirational figure, a mover and shaker whose devotion to Ethiopian
music underpins much of what has happened over the past decade. He
made his first visit to Ethiopia in 1984. A promoter and champion of
experimental music, he had fallen in love with a Mahmoud Ahmed record
a friend had given him. He decided to visit Addis in the hope of
recruiting Ahmed for a European tour. The city he found was a ghost
town with his – and everyone else’s – move monitored. ‘I had never
been to Africa so it was very frightening and very hard work.’
Falceto’s plans to tour Mahmoud came to nothing, but he met the star,
and his brief taste of Addis had him hooked. He began to visit
regularly, building up a library of the country’s vanishing musical
legacy. ‘I bought every cassette and 45 I could get my hands on,
rooting round dusty stalls and back street shops, and befriending the
label owners.’ The results of his obsession appeared in 1997, when the
first of his beautifully presented Éthiopiques albums was released.
By then the Derg was history, overthrown in a 1991 coup led by the
country’s current prime minister Meles Zenawi. Since then Ethiopia has
made a stumbling transition into a neo-democracy – the 2005 elections,
for example, led to a police massacre of 190 dissenters and the
imprisonment of Zenawi’s rivals. Military action against independence
movements in Ogaden and Somalia continues amid allegations of human
rights abuses.
‘Whatever you think of the current regime, at least musicians are
allowed to play what and where they want,’ says Falceto, who for the
last few years has been promoting an annual festival in Addis. His
co-promoter, Heruy Arefaire, grew up in Washington and returned to a
homeland he hadn’t known as an adult. He talks passionately about the
‘Addis Acoustic Renaissance’, and the revival of instruments like
clarinet, accordion and mandolin that were once fixtures in Ethiopian
music.
This year’s Addis festival included a French jazz group from Toulouse,
Les Tigres des Platanes, whose repertoire covers Fela Kuti, the Art
Ensemble of Chicago and assorted Ethiopian tracks. Falceto plans to
record them alongside Ethiopian singer Etenesh Wassie.
In general, however, Falceto is gloomy about the state of Ethiopian
music, which by the time he visited the country had declined into
gloop synth players in hotel lounges. ‘Imagine you were 17 in 1974 –
for 18 years you couldn’t go anywhere – by the time the regime falls
and the curfew ends in 1991 you are 35. That means that no one in that
country under 50 has a real folk memory of the glory days of Ethiopian
music.’
Yet the country’s appetite for its own brand of pop hasn’t
disappeared. Roadside stalls selling bootleg CDs do a brisk trade, and
the growing American Ethiopian population provides an eager audience
for visitors, and for a growing number of Ethiopian acts, like singers
Gigi and Aster Awake, who are based in North America, and who have
started to fuse tradition with new flavours.
For Falceto, the Éthiopiques ‘project’, as he calls it, is
ongoing. There are more old records to re-release, but you sense that
the archaeological phase is over. The sleeping giants whose music he
brought to the world are now playing, not just to Ethiopians but to
Westerners. Against all odds, there has been a resurrection. ‘It’s all
I dreamed of,’ says Mulatu Astatke, ‘for Ethiopia to get
recognised. It’s beautiful.’
· Ethiopiques play the Barbican, London EC2 on 27 June and Glastonbury
on 28 June. Éthiopiques: The Very Best of Éthiopiques is out now on
Manteca. To hear Mulatu Astatke at his recent London show at Cargo, go
to
Who was Haile Selassie?
Born Tafari Makonnen, Haile Selassie ruled Ethiopia with an iron fist
between 1930 and 1974. But in Jamaica, particularly, he was also
hailed as a living God (or ‘Jah’) following the interpretation of a
Biblical prophesy by members of a new movement called Rastafari. Bob
Marley later did much to popularise the faith. In Ethiopia, there is
now a Rasta colony in Shashamane. ‘Rastas promote our flag,’ according
to one young writer, ‘but the rest – the Selassie worship, the
drugging and idling – have nothing to do with us.’
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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
