t’s a scorching hot afternoon in a recording studio outside Toulouse in southern France. Inspired by the Ethiopiques albums compiled by French music producer Francis Falceto, local experimental jazz quartet Le Tigre Des Platanes have invited Ethiopian traditional singer Etenesh Wassie to work with them, and Falceto to oversee the project.
Despite the language barrier, the results are dramatic. Furious free-form brass and percussion are interspersed with declamatory, harsh-edged vocals, and there’s an extraordinary passage in which she duets with a wild solo saxophone. ‘That,” explains Falceto, ‘was a traditional Ethiopian greeting song.”
Mali may still dominate the African music scene, but in recent years Ethiopian dance music, especially that from the ‘golden age” of the 1960s and early 1970s, has built up the biggest following among musicians outside the continent.
That era ended when Emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown by a military junta in 1974. Regular curfews meant that clubs could no longer operate and many musicians fled abroad. This is the music that has been released on Falceto’s comprehensive Ethiopiques archive series (which will reach Volume 23 in a few weeks, following the release of The Very Best of Ethiopiques).
Earlier this year the era’s most famous survivor, Mahmoud Ahmed, was honoured at the BBC Radio 3 awards for world music, where he gave a rousing performance and an impressive display of African pogo dancing.
Ethiopian music is very different from other African styles, perhaps because the country — with its long embrace of Christianity and no experience of Western colonialism — has had a unique history. Ethiopian musicians looked to their traditional music and to black America when they created their gloriously distinctive fusion of local styles with American R&B, funk and free-form jazz.
Falceto has been rediscovering and reissuing that music since 1986. In 1984 he was working as a promoter, specialising in experimental music, free jazz and new music, when, at a party, a friend played an album by Mahmoud Ahmed that he’d bought in Ethiopia. Falceto was amazed.
He started travelling to Ethiopia, where he contacted Ahmed, who was then running a music store, and began to revive the singer’s career by arranging a European release for his now-celebrated Ere Mela Mela, originally recorded 11 years earlier. Then, realising there was ‘a music mine that had to be explored”, he started researching songs by other musicians from the era and began the often painstaking task of hunting down the original reel-to-reel masters of the vinyls.
In the process he has become an expert in a remarkable period of African musical history that in many ways echoed the 1960s musical revolution in the West.
Selassie played a key, if indirect role, because it was during his long rule that Ethiopia’s love affair with brass took off. By the 1950s and early 1960s, brass instruments played a major role in Ethiopian pop though, for much of this era, all bands were controlled by Selassie’s authorities and no private orchestras were allowed. The best singers and players worked with such state-controlled outfits as the Police Band, the Haile Selassie Theatre Band or (most importantly) the Imperial Bodyguard Band, which in the early 1960s included Mahmoud Ahmed.
Yet, as the Ethiopiques compilations show, there was nothing staid about these bands, for they made sure that they checked out all the latest American hits and then mixed them with local styles. It wasn’t just Mahmoud Ahmed who pioneered the new fusion. Other extraordinary singers of the era include Alemayehu Eshete, who became known as the Ethiopian James Brown for his frantic funk workouts that retained an Ethiopian edge.
There was also Tewelde Redda, who played an amplified version of the Ethiopian lyre, the krar. Then there was Getatchew Mekurya, who played in the Haile Selassie Theatre Band and Police Band, and developed his unique style by listening to shellela, furious war cries used by armies before battle. When played on Mekurya’s saxophone, the result was like free-form jazz.
At the same time, a brave 26-year-old musician, Amba Eshete, started his own record label. His now legendary vinyls, recorded in Ethiopia but manufactured in India, make up much of the Ethiopiques collection.
Falceto notes that while Tewelde Redda and Alemayehu Eshete are still in good form, many musicians from the era are ‘living in misery when they should have a nice life because of their work”.
Lately Falceto has been amazed by how contemporary Western bands have responded to his Ethiopiques series by creating their own treatment of Ethiopian 1960s styles and has started taking those bands to Ethiopia. —