Hailu Mergia on Music and Memory
The organ and accordion master reflects on life before his upcoming concert in Washington, D.C.
‘Tizita’ is like our national anthem, our unofficial one. I don’t know where it came from, it’s older than me. But if you’re a musician auditioning for a role, at least as it was for me, ‘Tizita’ is what you will play.”
Hailu Mergia, famed Ethiopian jazz artist and a DC metro area resident of over 30 years, is telling me about nostalgia.
Tizita (also spelled “tezeta”) is the Amharic word for nostalgia, and is at once the name of a single melody and an entire genre of traditional Ethiopian music, melancholy and soulful. We are sitting in Mergia’s living room in his spacious and comfortable suburban home. The walls are lined with pictures of Mergia over the years, always dressed in style, with friends and bandmates past and present.
He has every reason to be nostalgic, after a legendary career in Ethiopia and a resounding return to performing that has now spanned half a decade. It is no surprise that the opening song on Lala Belu, his first original album in over 15 years, is his own version of “Tizita.” The song is a 10-minute saga, starting with the familiar traditional melody and morphing into a vibrant, unflagging solo that undeniably bears the mark of Mergia.
In some ways this song and this album was an audition, this time for his return to the global stage. Since his return, Mergia has been profiled by nearly every major media publication, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vice News, the Guardian, NPR, and many, many a music blog. He’s played several smoky sets in New York City this spring, one at Brooklyn Bazaar with eccentric disc-jockey Jonathan Toubin, the other a campus set hosted by WNYU. In the middle of these two performances, during April, he found time for a casual nine-city European tour. And this Sunday, June 9th, Mergia and his band will perform at The Hamilton as part of the DC Jazzfest.
Mergia’s performance at the Hamilton, just one block from the White House, harkens back to his early performance days in Addis Ababa. He used to regularly play two sets a night in the swanky Hilton Hotel — the first for diplomatic dinner crowds and the second for young locals — as a member of the Walias, one of the most popular Ethiopian bands in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Playing in the center of downtown DC, it’s likely that Mergia’s clientele on Sunday will be fairly similar, and should seem like a breeze after the eight-hour sets he used to play in the ’70s. But for Mergia, coming back onto the global stage was nerve-wracking. Mergia recounts that when he began touring in Europe, he faced many questions from agents booking venues. “Do you have a reference? Do you have any videos?” they asked. According to Mergia, “I didn’t have any of these, just some photos and old cassettes.”
Since Mergia’s music is primarily instrumental, his audience is not limited by language, but he was still unsure how his music would fare outside of the Ethiopian community. As he began playing with Tony Buck and Mike Majkowski, the bassist and drummer with whom he recorded Lala Belu, he would often ask them, “Do you guys really like this music?”, and they assured him that they did. Mergia giddily recounted his first live performance after his long hiatus, in Germany in 2013. Mergia alternated between piano and accordion with fervor, and the band went over their time limit. The crowd loved it. He was so electrified that he couldn’t sleep, and in the middle of the night he called his wife just to give her the full rundown.
If there is a line that can be drawn through Mergia’s music, it is his desire to continually recreate himself and his sound. He tells me “I have to come up with new stuff… everybody has to participate,” otherwise people will get bored. Mergia points to a melodica sitting on his coffee table, which he brings to all of his live shows as another exercise in style.
Lala Belu, released in 2018 by Awesome Tapes From Africa, is Mergia’s latest addition to his morphing musical canon. The album is split between three traditional Ethiopian songs and three original compositions, and the musical styles span from his idiosyncratic version of “Tizita,” to the percussion-heavy “Addis Nat,” to the companionable chorus of title track “Lala Belu,” to the pensive final song: a solo piano ballad called “Yefikir Engurguro.”
Through the revolving and often experimental moods of Lala Belu, Mergia shows his commitment to grappling with ever-more interpretations of tizita. It’s easy to think of nostalgia as a feeling of being arrested by the past, preferring memories over the present as a flimsy defense against the passing of time. But it is in his past that Mergia finds inspiration to keep innovating.
Portraying tizita can be a tricky subject. As Cornell professor Dag Woubshet explains it, “At its worst, a tizita ballad is sappy, enamored of its own sentimental excesses. At its best and most expressive, however, tizita is fierce and lyrical.”
Nothing could resonate more with Mergia’s relationship to the genre. Mergia remembers that in the 1970s, the Walias regularly played their own version of “Tizita,” which began with a classical melody but evolved into a funky performance for the young crowds at the Hilton skirting the government-imposed curfew. He explains that the most recent version, on Lala Belu, adds yet another dimension. Not only does it traverse classical and funky moods, but evolves into, as Mergia puts it, a “swing” rhythm progression, and culminates into undefinable free-form expression.
These transitions mirror Mergia’s winding path from his youth in rural Ethiopia, to Addis Ababa during a time of cultural and political transition, and to his eventual immigration to DC. Starting off as a singer, he switched to playing the accordion and went on to become increasingly popular for his mastery of the organ, which few Ethiopian musicians were playing at the time. Mergia was a founding member of the Walias Band, who became the house band at the Hilton Hotel. The Walias went on to collaborate with the father of “Ethio-jazz,” Mulatu Astatke, on their timeless album Tche Belew.
At the same time, jazz had become a political subject in Mergia’s future home, Washington, D.C. Starting in the 1950s, the State Department began funding famous musicians to travel to far-off countries as members of the Jazz Ambassadors program, a form of soft diplomacy to highlight freedom of expression in regions where there was a growing presence of autocratic communism.
One of the last of these trips was Duke Ellington’s visit to Addis Ababa in 1973. Mulatu Astatke was the Duke’s personal guide, and the Walias opened for his band. Mergia recounted that after the performance, the Walias immediately left to play another show nearby. Members of Ellington’s band loved the sound so much that they came to jam, and the saxophonist jumped on stage with the Walias. The music scene in Addis was just as fluid for local artists — during the ’70s Mergia also recorded an iconic album with the Dahlak Band, the house players at the nearby Ghion hotel, in three days.
However, just a year after Duke Ellington’s visit to Addis Ababa, the long-time emperor Haile Selassie was unseated in a military coup and the communist Derg government came to power. The government coup and increasing global tensions led to enormous instability in Ethiopia. It was during this period that the relevance of songs like “Tizita,” similarly to other forms of national expression, became more complex. Their historical context allowed them to straddle the new borders being drawn around freedom of expression; while these songs were co-opted by the government to build a new brand of national nostalgia, their permissibility granted innovative musicians an opportunity to keep crafting new identities.
So the Walias’ music went on. While the Walias remained in Ethiopia throughout the ’70s, in 1981 Mergia and the band traveled to the United States, playing mainly for small communities of Ethiopian immigrants and refugees. Due to difficult circumstances at home, many Ethiopians continued to emigrate, starting a trend that turned DC into one the largest communities of Ethiopians outside of Africa.
When asked how DC became the eventual destination for Ethiopian immigrants, Mergia mentioned two important factors: The first was the history of Haile Selassie’s visits to the United States, in particular his friendship with John F. Kennedy, which sparked a keen interest in Washington, D.C among Ethiopians. The second factor was the Ethiopian Embassy, a center for the community to gather and the only place to get news of home.
After the Walias’ tour ended, the band split, with some members staying in the US and others traveling back to Ethiopia. A subset, including Mergia, became the Zula band, which had a global tour of its own. However, the touring did not last much longer, and in 1991 the remaining members living in the US began to explore different careers.
Following a gap of over twenty years, the resurgence of Mergia’s music is uncanny. A matrix of cultural trends and technological media have aligned in its favor. When Mergia began as a taxi driver at Dulles Airport in the ’90s, he invested in a battery-powered Yamaha keyboard so he could play while waiting on customers, and even made sure that the car he bought could fit a keyboard in the backseat.
Despite continuing to practice, he never expected that he would return to the global stage. One day in 2012, however, he received a momentous call from halfway around the world.
Brian Simkovitz, head of the Awesome Tapes From Africa label which released Lala Belu, was looking through stacks of old cassettes in a music store in Ethiopia when he discovered one of Mergia’s albums. Simkovitz is a poster child of music’s growing analog movement. In protest to the ubiquity of streaming services, or simply enamored by the glimmer of rarity, hobbyists have fueled a major revival in the collection of analog records, CDs, and cassette tapes. After receiving a Fulbright scholarship focusing on ethnomusicology in Ghana, Simkovitz started his music blog to provide exposure to the many older musicians in Africa whose work often lives only on these time-worn forms of media. The particular tape that Simkovitz found in 2012 was Hailu Mergia and His Classical Instrument, originally released in 1985, an album with a distinct mix of DIY electronic and psychedelic sounds that modern artists today strive to emulate.
Enthralled by the music, Simkovitz immediately knew he had to contact Mergia. Fortunately, Mergia still had the master copy. The two began to collaborate.
Fast-forward several years, and many of Mergia’s albums have been remastered and re-released. Among the merch offered on Mergia’s Bandcamp, the cassette tape bundles are conspicuously sold out. Mergia is happily surprised by his newfound following, as well as the revival of analog and vinyl collecting. He recounts how his performances at the Hilton Hotel in the 1970’s were inspired by records from the American Library in Addis Ababa. The Walias picked up songs like “New York, New York,” “Stranger in the Night,” and “Misty,” which they intertwined with classic Ethiopian melodies. Through the increasing availability of recording equipment as well as the growing influence of international radio stations, the band picked up songs from all over the world to play for the revolving crowd at the Hilton Hotel. This included “everything from Japanese to Indian to Sudanese to Arabic songs” — whatever Mergia says were “standard tunes” of the time.
Even though a cassette sparked the collaboration between him and Simkovitz, Mergia’s following has now gone far beyond the analog. Mergia has always experimented with new tools in his music, and likewise has also embraced the advent of social media. With the help of Awesome Tapes From Africa, all of Mergia’s albums have now found a home on YouTube, along with recorded performances in Europe and even a coveted Boiler Room set. Mergia has even taken to regularly updating his Facebook fan page.
The performance at the Hamilton, as part of the DC Jazzfest, is a rare moment in which the many lives of Hailu Mergia will align. He will be playing alongside two bandmates with whom he has grown very comfortable over the past few years: Alemseged Kebede on bass and Kenneth Joseph on drums. The Capitol has not only been his home for three decades, but has been a home for an ever-evolving jazz scene and an ever-growing Ethiopian community.
When asked about his concerts, Mergia tells me they are never fully planned. He insists on passages for solos and freeform serenades. Other than dim light, an accordion, and one stylish septuagenarian, not much else can be assured. As Hailu says himself, “Who knows next time what we’re going to do?”
Photography and Editing by: Jake West
Further reading:
Find out more about the upcoming concert at the Hamilton.
Check out Hailu Mergia’s bandcamp profile.
Explore new music on Awesome Tapes From Africa.
Read this academic interpretation of the meaning of Tizita from Cornell professor Dag Woubshet (page 5).
See this report on the Ethiopian Diaspora in the United States by the Migration Policy Institute.
