Originaly posted on Awesome Tapes from Africa >here
This 1992 recording (1986 in Ethiopian calendar) is an awesome tape. I've had a YouTube crush on the music of Eritrean legend Yemane G/Michael (aka Yemane Baria, Yemane Barya, etc) for a while and this mostly-acoustic recording is completely bringing me back to a recent trip to Tigray, Ethiopia. The region neighbors Eritrea, and shares a language and musical vibe. I dug this tape up from deep in the stash months ago but didn't really get into it until now. Pentatonic strings and keyboard join the vocal melodies, dancing up and down in a lovely lilt. Amidst the quintessential [ka-dunk] rhythm that is characteristic of a lot of Tigrinya folk music I heard around the Eritrean border, this tape stands out: minimally arranged, urgent, beautiful.
recorded live @ 17ème Rencontre Internationale de la Clarinette Populaire, Glomel, France, may 7, 2005.
A musical meeting between Yanna Badume's Band and virtuoso clarinetist of Ethiopia Aklilu Zewdie (director of Yared School, National School of Music at the University of Addis Ababa).
Aklilu Zewdie
Want to find Poullaouen Glomel and the atmosphere of warm nights in Addis Ababa 70's, when fantastic crooners bewitched girls with languid melodies
Wild! Pulsating! This afro-latin jazz album of Mulatu and His Quintet is an unique and exciting mixture of three cultures: Ethiopian, Puerto Rican and American! During the session, featuring Felix Torres and John Perez on percussions, Mulatu masterfully jumps from vibes to piano to drums. This album is one you will always treasure!
Ethiopian sounds with a twist
By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent
November 5, 2004
It's been decades since Mulatu Astatke has performed his so-called Ethio Jazz in the United States, back when he toured and recorded in the 1960s with his Ethiopian Quintet. But the arranger-composer will be doing so again Wednesday in Arlington at the Regent Theatre, in the first of three concerts with the Either/Orchestra.
A fusion of the traditional music of Mulatu's native Ethiopia and the jazz and Latin influences he picked up as a student in London and Boston in the late 1950s and early '60s, Ethio Jazz enjoyed its short, largely unnoticed heyday between Mulatu's return to Ethiopia from New York in 1968 and the rise of the Marxist dictatorship there in 1974, after which the recording industry in that country remained shuttered for years.
By then, Mulatu had become a major figure in Ethiopian music. He had done so by bringing home and introducing such Western instruments as a Hammond organ, vibes, congas, and timbales, and, more important, by adapting to traditional Ethiopian melodies the composing and arranging skills he had studied under Herb Pomeroy and others during a short stretch at the Berklee College of Music.
Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and others were experimenting with modal jazz at the time Mulatu was studying jazz, and that and other influences shaped his Ethio Jazz.
''I still listen a lot to Gil Evans," says Mulatu by phone from his son's home in northern Virginia, recalling the musicians who affected him most in those seminal years. ''I love George Shearing very much -- I like his changes, I like his approach to his 12-tone music. I was listening a lot to Randy Weston. Coltrane I was listening to a lot. And Miles. Those are the people who really influenced me."
Mulatu's main challenge in combining traditional Ethiopian music with jazz, he says, involved integrating the pentatonic-scale-based melodies of Ethiopia with the 12 tones on which Western music is based. The result, to Western ears, has an eerie, exotic, almost trancelike feel to it, coupled with more familiar jazz, Latin, and soul rhythms and harmonies.
''Whatever you do," Mulatu says, ''if you touch the melody, then the whole thing's going to be changed. So the only thing you have to do to make this music interesting is to really work on the harmonic side of it. So I really worked on what I studied -- nice arrangements and nice voicings and nice soloing."
Mulatu's recorded output has, of course, been sparse. Still, it was recordings that serendipitously brought him together with the Either/Orchestra this past January, when the E/O capped off a two-week tour of the country by becoming the first non-Ethiopian band to perform at the annual Ethiopian Music Festival in Addis Ababa.
Russ Gershon, Either/Orchestra's leader, became smitten with Ethiopian music after acquiring several CDs from the French producer Francis Falceto's ''Ethiopiques" series, which included Mulatu work from the early '70s.
Gershon went on to include arrangements of Ethiopian tunes on the E/O CDs ''More Beautiful Than Death" and ''Afro-Cubism." Those got noticed by Falceto and led to an E/O appearance in Addis Ababa. (The E/O's live festival performances with various Ethiopian musicians, including Mulatu, will make up volume 21 or 22 of the ''Ethiopiques" series, says Gershon, and probably be released this spring.)
''There's not that long tradition of high-level jazz playing that they're coming out of," Gershon says of the Ethiopian instrumentalists he heard on disc, ''so there's a sort of simplicity to the playing that I really like. . . . It's sort of all vibe, all feeling, coming through relatively simple technique."
For his part, Mulatu, whose main performing instruments are vibraphone, piano, and percussion, is delighted after all these years to work with American musicians who combine high-caliber chops and a genuine affinity for his music.
''They feel this music," he says, ''and they really play it so nice."
Minyeshu Kifle Tedla was born in the city of Dire Dawa in the east of Ethiopia. During her childhood she moved to Addis Ababa and at the age of 17 she joined the leading ‘National Theatre’ of Ethiopia. Here she developed her artistic multi talents as a singer, dancer, producer and choreographer. With the crème de la crème of the Ethiopian music scene she toured the world around - within 4 month over more than 35 countries - and performed at the greatest Ethiopian music and dance production ever: ‘People to People’.
She joined the stage with famous Ethiopian musical icons such as Mulatu Astatke and singers Mahmoud Ahmed, Tilahun Gessesse, Bizunesh Bekele and many more. To widespread her wings as an artistic multi talent she performed in Ethiopian cinema as well, playing a leading role as an actress in the movie ‘Senait’
Clashing Egos successfully blend the sound of Mo' Wax-like trip hop grooves and exotic sounds with the voices of Darryll-Ann frontman Jelle Paulusma, British singer Kirsty Hawkshaw and Ethiopian vocalist Minyeshu Kifle.
Especially the latter does an impressive performance on the melancholic Afro tune 'Aminjig Nebere (I Trusted You)'. The album reveals itself as a steady grower, so don't trust your initial judgment and certainly use a headset when listening to it because it's truly a sound experrience. "We wanted to make a beautiful album’. It’s much more than just that, it's electronic soulmusic for the 21st century.
