← Back to Countries

Ethiopia

Jimma, 1943 — father of Ethio-jazz

Mulatu Astatke

Mulatu Astatke was sent away at sixteen to study engineering at a Welsh boarding school. He found the music department instead, went on to Trinity College of Music in London, and in the 1960s to Berklee in Boston, where he was its first African student. He came home with a method, and a style on top of it: Ethiopian pentatonic modes laid over jazz harmony, Latin percussion and funk basslines. He called it Ethio-jazz. When Duke Ellington's orchestra visited Addis Ababa in November 1973 to play for Emperor Haile Selassie, Astatke wrote them a horn arrangement built on three different Ethiopian modes at once. For one night, American jazz royalty played by Ethiopia's rules.

Addis Ababa, 1923 — piano, then vows

Emahoy Tsegue-Mariam Gebru

Born Yewubdar Gebru in Addis Ababa in 1923, she was among the first Ethiopian girls sent to Europe for schooling. She had piano and violin lessons in Switzerland from around age six, then studied violin in Cairo, where she played for Emperor Haile Selassie while still a teenager. In her mid-twenties she turned down a place at a European conservatory and took monastic vows instead, and spent roughly a decade at a remote hilltop monastery before she went back to composing. "Emahoy" is an honorific for a woman who has taken those vows, not part of her given name, but it became the name the world knew her by. Her music, a self-taught mix of Ethiopian modal scales and Romantic piano, was collected in 2006 on Éthiopiques Vol. 21. She died in Jerusalem in 2023, at ninety-nine.

Discovered mid-shoeshine, Addis Ababa

Mahmoud Ahmed

Mahmoud Ahmed was shining shoes and running errands at the Arizona Club, a hangout for Emperor Haile Selassie's Imperial Bodyguard Band, when the regular singer didn't show up one night in 1962. He stepped in, and stayed in the band's circle for the next twelve years. Recording with the Ibex Band, who worked out of Addis Ababa's Hilton and Wabi Shebele hotels, he cut Érè Mèla Mèla. It was pressed in Ethiopia in 1975 on the small Kaifa label and barely heard outside the country until the Belgian label Crammed Discs reissued it in 1986. After that, a local golden-age record became one of the best-known Ethiopian albums abroad.

Addis Ababa — "The Voice," 1940–2009

Tilahun Gessesse

Tilahun Gessesse sang three times for Emperor Haile Selassie, and to a generation of Ethiopians he was simply "The Voice," the tenor of the country's 1960s golden age. During the famines of the 1970s and '80s his recordings helped raise large sums for relief, and the University of Addis Ababa later gave him an honorary doctorate for it. When he died in April 2009, Addis Ababa gave him a state funeral. There was a funeral mass at Holy Trinity Cathedral, condolences came from the president and prime minister, and the crowd at Meskel Square was counted by some in the hundreds of thousands and by others at close to a million.

Sang against his father's wishes

Getachew Kassa

Getachew Kassa started singing at around age six, against his father's wishes, and trained his ear on Elvis Presley, Harry Belafonte and the Italian pop songs coming over the radio. He played accordion for fifteen birr a night at Addis Ababa's Sombrero club, then went through the Harar Police Orchestra and the Fetan Band, and on into the Walias Band with keyboardist Hailu Mergia and pianist Girma Beyene. It was a small circle of golden-age musicians, and they kept turning up on each other's records. He helped bring back tizita, which is more or less Ethiopia's blues, and later spent close to a decade touring the United States to raise awareness of the famine back home.

Walias Band, then a D.C. taxi's trunk

Hailu Mergia

Hailu Mergia arranged and played keyboards for the Walias Band during its long residency at the Addis Ababa Hilton. It was one of Ethiopia's first private orchestras, playing jazz-funk for the hotel's international guests. In 1981, on the band's first tour abroad, he decided to stay in the United States instead of going back to an increasingly repressive government. He couldn't make a living from music, so he spent close to two decades driving a taxi around Washington, D.C., with a small keyboard in the trunk to play between fares. In 2013 a music blogger going through a D.C. shop found one of his old cassettes, tracked him down, and helped restart a recording career that led to 2018's Lala Belu, his first new album in decades.

The Collection