Ethiopian Jazz is Dominating My Spotify Playlist

In the early 70s, Ethiopia experienced a golden age of popular music with the rise of “Ethio-jazz” — a mesmerizing blend of zigzagging modal melodies and diminished harmonies played against a funky six-beat groove. At the center of the scene was vocalist Mahmoud Ahmed, who has been hailed as “one of the most exhilarating singers of the past half century” (The New Yorker). Ahmed’s 1975 album Erè Mèla Mèla is a classic release from the golden age of Ethiopian music and was the first East African release from that era to be embraced by a broad Western audience. (Duke Performances, 2015)

On September 10, Duke University Performances kicked off its first event of the year with African artist Mahmoud Ahmed, the current international face of Ethiopian Jazz. Mahmoud Ahmed’s music blends Ethiopia’s distinctive pentatonic minor tones with the six-beat jazz meter and a 10-piece band, complete with saxophones, a keyboardist, and drummer.

Some of y’all might be particularly confused.

Ethiopia has jazz? I thought it was just a famine-stricken wasteland.

Actually, Ethiopian music is flourishing. And might I say that EthioJazz slays.

Oh.

EthioJazz has its origins in Mulatu Astatke, a musician who brought his talent for music and Western education (in London and New York) to Ethiopia’s vivacious night-life scene in 1969. By blending the musical sounds of his culture with elements of jazz that he picked up during his studies, the name EthioJazz was born.

Learn more about the Father of Ethiopian Jazz!

Emperor Haile Selassie was particularly open to advancing Ethiopia’s art and cultural spheres; Ethiopian music flourished under his regime until the government was overthrown and replaced by totalitarian communist rule. Over the next 2 decades, many art movements including EthioJazz, endured brutal suppression of Ethiopia’s Red Terror (called the Derg). Many proponents of the Jazz Age sought exile in the West. Even so, the movement stayed alive, if not stronger, with the fall of the Derg in the 1990s.

The Police Ethiopiques Jazz band performs in 1965–6 Addis Ababa during Ethiopia’s Jazz Age (from Time.com)

Today, Ethiopia’s capital of Addis Ababa flourishes with jazz bars and clubs at every street corner, featuring live musical bands and a chill atmosphere to spend on weekend nights. Nothing beats my childhood memories in the booming city of Addis Ababa, circled around a heaping plate of Ethiopian injera as we tapped our feet to the soothing rhythm of a live Ethiopian Jazz Band.

Surely EthioJazz is challenging the West’s portrayal of African poverty and strife.

Check out some of our favourite Ethiopian Jazz Artists on YouTube and Spotify:

Top tracks for Mulatu Astatke by Mulatu Astatke