SWINGING BACK TO OLD ADDIS
Nick Hasted
The Independent – United Kingdom
Published: Aug 10, 2007
Bill Murray’s American road trip to visit old lovers in Jim Jarmusch’s
Broken Flowers (2005) had unforeseen side-effects. The use of Mulatu
Astatqe’s sensual jazz on the soundtrack revealed to a wide audience
a lost world of sophisticated Ethiopian music, more strange, yet more
familiar, than anything else from Africa. A triumphant performance
by the nation’s Mahmoud Ahmed at Womad 2005 was, meanwhile, followed
by his winning Radio 3’s 2007 African World Music award.
Awed comments about Ethiopia’s musical wealth from Elvis Costello,
Arcade Fire’s Win Butler, Robert Plant, Patti Smith and Brian Eno have
added to the acclaim. And the catalyst for all this has been one heroic
act of musical excavation: the Ethiopiques series, 21 CDs and counting.
A double-CD best-of next week shows what the fuss is about. Its 28
tracks were almost all recorded during a brief "golden age" between
the slackening of Emperor Haile Se-lassie’s rule in the late 1960s and
his overthrow by President Mengistu’s Derg dictatorship in 1974. The
Frenchman Francis Falceto, who has curated the series on his Buda
Musique label, talks of "Swinging Addis Ababa", Africa’s equivalent
to London’s 1960s effervescence.
Here, American funk and jazz opened up a music scene too proudly
nationalistic to admit other African influences, resulting in a
surreally unique brew.
The Very Best of Ethiopiques inverts the usual "World Music"
tale, showing an African country absorbing American sounds for its
own ends. Listening to it is a constant surprise. Ahmed is here,
of course, his easily conversational then imploring voice rippling
over Stax-style organs. Then there’s a still greater singer, Tlahoun
Gessesse, Ethiopia’s national hero, unknown elsewhere. He scales
strange notes with a shocking, piercing voice.
But underneath, again, you can hear Harlem jazz and soul transmuted
to Addis, alongside more ominous, exotic atmospheres. His "Sema"
could be a "Ghost Town" for Selassie’s last days.
Astatqe shows why Jarmusch wanted him, with dreamy jazz soundscapes
and pulsing tempos, while Alemayehu Eshete combines muezzin wails with
James Brown barks. And as you dig deeper into the album, you realise
how foreign this music is, for all its familiarity, as mes-merising
Ethiopian rhythms, ululations and instruments appear. By then, you
will be wondering: what on Earth was that?
Falceto has spent 20 years discovering the answer. His obsession
began after a party in 1984, when a friend played him an Ahmed LP he
had heard by chance in Addis Ababa. Falceto flew there the following
month. A curfew imposed by Mengistu in 1974 had already destroyed
Addis’s nightlife, and the world that Ahmed’s LP hinted at.
Movement of the musicians who remained was so restricted that
Falceto could do little to help them until the regime’s collapse
in 1991. Still, he persevered. "This LP of Mahmoud Ahmed [ Era Mela
Mela] on Crammed Disc in Brussels in 1986 – this was the first release
abroad of modern Ethiopian music," he proudly told journalist Benning
Eyre. "It was a kind of fetish for me. This was the LP that opened
the doors for Ethiopian music."
Other early LPs had to be completed with French musicians. But Falceto
had made contact with Amha Eshete, producer of Addis’s greatest
label Amha Records, in exile in Washington in 1987. In 1997, the pair
tracked down the label’s master-tapes in Columbia’s Athens archive
(for Falceto, "the greatest day of my life"). In October that year,
the first two Ethiopiques came out.
Each volume is themed, by artist, region, instrument, genre, or
era. As Falceto dug deeper, buying up vinyl from other labels, and
interviewing the original artists, in Ethiopia or its Derg-fleeing
diaspora, he formed a picture of Addis’s amazingly diverse, fertile
golden age, played out in decadent, liberated hotel nightclubs. And
he pieced together the unique national history that allowed it.
Ethiopia’s defeat of an Italian invasion in 1896, the only African
nation to repel coloni-sation (till Mussolini’s brief occupation),
caused early European fascination. The Tsar’s gift of brass instruments
and a Russian music teacher was followed by Selassie’s adoption of
an Armenian orphans’ band and its teacher in 1924.
By the late 1940s, with Glenn Miller’s records another unlikely
foreign influence, Ethiopia was developing cosmopolitan pop. As US
military-base radio stations pumped out soul and funk in the 1960s,
and Selassie’s grip weakened, Ethiopia’s multicultural brew reached
its peak.
Ethiopiques’ unlikely Hollywood star, Astatqe, shows the fragility
of the achievement. He learnt classical music in London and jazz in
the US, before forming the Ethiopian Quintet with Puerto Ricans in
New York. Combining jazz, Latin and Ethiopian styles into his own
"Ethio-jazz" in the 1960s, Duke Ellington praised him. But back home,
things were very different. "I tried to do a jazz concert in Addis
Ababa," Astatqe recalled last year, "and people couldn’t tolerate
it. It was too progressive. People were actually shouting."
The true extent of the "golden age" in Ethiopia is questioned, too, by
producer Neway Mengistu. "It was music for the elite from Addis Ababa,"
he says, "but 90 per cent of Ethiopians live rurally. And even in the
urban areas, very few could go to the nightclubs where it was played."
That hardly invalidates the wonderful music Falceto has uncovered. If
Ethiopia never quite created a source-equalling mutation of its
own from US soul and funk, as that other Se-lassie-revering nation,
Jamaica, did with reggae in the same period, these sensual, atmospheric
records still match America on all counts.
Falceto plans 35 CDs in all, including one of 78rpm records of deep
rural music from the time of the Fascist occupation, just coming
to light. He has little time for Ethiopian music since the Derg’s
depredations, which left most of the musicians of the "golden age"
retired, or dispiritedly wandering the diaspora’s outposts, playing
weddings in Little Ethiopias in Washington, DC or New York.
Falceto believes the flowering of the 1960s was permanently crushed
by 18 years of censorship, and the rule of soldiers on the Addis
streets, where once there was dancing. Clearly feeling nostalgia
for a place and time he’s never been, he has almost stopped going
to the city’s nightclubs to look for Ethiopiques acts, finding the
new breed of synth-playing soloists too depressing. It may take a
younger proselytiser of equal passion to say if he is wrong. Instead,
another series is tentatively planned on Ethiopia’s music of the
1940s and 1950s. "The Ethiopiques series is a small thing," he says,
"compared to the mine that is sleeping there, forgotten."
Falceto is clear on why Jarmusch and the rest have become so addicted
to these records. "What’s known as world music made us think that we
already knew all the music created in Africa. Suddenly, it turns out
there is an Ethiopian musical culture that we weren’t acquainted
with." Nor does Addis Ababa’s urban tumult begin to scratch the
surface of a huge country the size of France and Spain combined, and
so old that its Christianity predates most of Europe’s. The murmured
peace-prayers and buzzing strings of Alemu Aga’s King David’s harp
(the instrument that fills Ethiopiques 11), the traditional, hoarse
battle-songs Getatchew Mekurya has converted into Free Jazz sax honks,
and the bowed one-string violins with which the ancient musicians’
caste the Azmari still wander the land, are as much a part of
Ethiopia. But the urge of its nightclubbing artists to outdo America
is still what amazes.
Listening to The Very Best of Ethiopiques, you may not quite believe
your ears. You may also find Ethiopia’s modern image as a place of
death start to blur, as visions of a life-affirming melting pot slip
into focus.
‘The Very Best of Ethiopiques’ is out on Monday on Union Square Music.