On Biyya Chonta, Kumera Zekarias Creates a Heady Blend of Ethiopian and Colombian Grooves
In 2016, Kumera Zekarias, singer and guitarist of the DC band Kino Musica, attended a show by the Colombian band Tribu Baharu at the Adams Morgan international music haven Bossa. The performance — a danceable blend of Colombian and Congolese guitar-led grooves — wowed Zekarias, a Texas-born Ethiopian who has lived in the DC area since he was 21. He was very impressed that they displayed the flag of the Colombian Palenque, the escaped Africans who founded the Colombian town Palenque de San Basilio. “That made me want to dig really deeper,” Zakarias says.
Five years later, the result of his digging is a new record, Biyya Chonta, which Zekarias mostly recorded with Colombian musicians in Bogotá, Colombia.
Zekarias’ band Kino Musica plays Ethiopian music. But after seeing Tribu Baharu’s Bossa gig, Zekarias started listening to more Afro-Pacific Colombian music. In it he heard and visualized similarities to Ethiopian music and dance.
He decided to record songs reflective of both cultures. By summer 2018, he’d recorded a demo using guitar and Pro Tools. He sent the demo to a selected group of Colombian musicians and then travelled to Bogotá in October 2018 to record with them at Groove Studio — the same place where Tribu recorded their first album.
While Washington, DC may be best known musically for its go-go and punk bands, it’s also an international city with Ethiopian and Latino bands, and musicians from throughout the global diaspora. Such artists are supported by listeners and fellow musicians in the region’s immigrant communities as well as adventurous others. Their performances dot the calendars of supportive, comfy little clubs, such as Bossa. And as the capital, Washington is home to embassies, museums, governmental agencies, and non-profit organizations that play a supportive role. It was Zekarias’s bandmate, then Kino Musica saxophonist Regan Carver, who took him to that influential gig by Tribu Baharu. That’s also where Zekarias met Adriana Sofia, an Afro-Colombian woman from Bogotá, Colombia who was in DC on a fellowship.
After Zekarias recorded his four-song home demo, he asked Sofia, who had been part of a music and dance cultural organization in Bogotá, to find musicians he could work with there. She selected marimba player Larry Ararat of the band Chontadelia, and percussionist Maria Pacifico. Ararat soon recommended Chontadelia vocalist Margarita Redondo, from Barranquilla, Colombia. Sofia, Ararat, and Pacifico are all members of the organization called Grupo Cultural de Danza y Musika Palenke that started out as a daycare service but turned into a nonprofit for Blacks in Bogotá to learn about their Pacific culture.
From this heady, intercultural exchange, a compelling recording was born.
Three of Zekarias’ songs on Biyya Chonta have Ethiopian rhythms with corresponding similar Colombian rhythms. The fourth song uses a Latino cumbia beat with some Ethiopian elements. Zekarias says, “I sent the demo to the musicians along with a similar playlist of Ethiopian music. They listened to it, internalized it, and brought their own sensibilities to it. But Maria was the musician who really engaged with the music, especially the Ethiopian music.” Zekarias continues, “She was sending me these voice notes, like 5 or 6 minutes of her recording herself playing these different percussion instruments in her house. She would say ‘this rhythm is called a juga, it’s played these ways in these different parts of Colombia, and I think I am going to play this way on the recording.’ That’s why I call her the professor because she really taught me a lot about the Colombian side of the equation.”
This blend was both emergent and intentional. Zekarias says he very much wanted the project to feature Colombian rhythms on percussion and marimba, and Ethiopian vocal melodies and guitar. But Zekarias also says he tried to be conscious of advice he received from then DC-based musician Huda Asfour that he be organic in melding music genres rather than creating a forced collage. Zekarias says to help ensure that he gave room to his musical collaborators, “I want to hear what they’re bringing to the table not what I am asking them to play.”
That’s how the vocals also ended up with a Colombian aspect. Zekarias says marimba player Ararat and singer Redondo “taught me through practice how to harmonize seriously. It was like before and after.”
The lyrics are mostly in Spanish, but some are in the Ethiopian languages of Amharic and Oromo. Zekarias says he used the vocabulary he has in each language and intentionally kept the themes slightly open to interpretation. “You can paint 65% of the picture and no matter what, people are going to fill in the other 35% of it. Leaving that other 35% open is actually special and helps people to fill in and find individual meaning in it as long as the ethics and concept of it are clear.”
One doesn’t have to be an ethnomusicologist or be fluent in multiple languages to appreciate the EP, although the explanations on Bandcamp do help with the context. Title track “Biyya Chonta,” (“Biyya” is Oromo for territory and “Chonta” is Spanish for palm trees) is about finding an imaginary place where one can escape war and just hear music and singing from “Las voces del Pacifico.” The song starts with chanting and then guitar playing inspired by Saharan desert bands but then Zekarias speaks in Spanish over the pinging of the marimba. “Brinca” uses a Colombian cumbia rhythm and contrasts Zekarias’ low, earthy voice with the higher, passionate one of Redondo. It’s also enlivened by a minor chord Ethiopian jazz sax solo from Kino Musica’s Besufekad Tedesse. “Guadenoch” is a speedy north african guitar and marimba instrumental. The powerful closing track, “Addey Kiyya,” about Zekarias’ Oromo aunt trying to survive the ravages of war, starts with light-feeling Ethiopian guitar. Zekarias’ melancholy vocal is answered by Redondo, Ararat, & Zekarias harmonizing a chorus over the polyrhythms of marimba and percussion including shakers and bombo drums. Later, Redondo’s voice soars and stretches and Zekarias responds with a melancholy guitar solo.
Zekarias’s buzzing guitar work stands out as well. He says that a friend has jokingly told him that he “can’t speak Amharic that well, but your guitar does.” He says his playing on this recording is “mostly based on Eastern Oromo guitar from the border area near Kenya and Somalia; and the other influences are even more than Mali is the music from Western Sahara.” Zekarias notes that one of his Ethiopian guitar influences, Ali Mohammed Birra, is hailed for his vocals by many, but Zekarias loves his stringbending.
Zekarias notes that because he didn’t have a full group to record live, they recorded each instrument separately track by track. He says that the studio and the musicians “showed me how you could put life in the song and make it feel like people were recording together.”
Working in Groove Studio in Colombia with its engineers for two ten-hour days, Zekarias was aware of all of the cultural dynamics involved in this effort as an American Ethiopian coming to Colombia and performing hybrid Ethiopian/Afro-Colombian music with Afro-Colombians. “They were telling me how they work with lots of people from the United States, but I was the first person who started off with them speaking Spanish to them. They were great and the musicians loved working with them also which mattered a lot because this is Black Colombian music from a very marginalized part of the country.”
He says he asked himself whether it was “an ethical collaboration.” He notes, “there’s race, nationality, and heritage. Normally between Black folks there’s not as much concern. But I will say that I was hyper-concerned and sensitive.”
Zekarias admits that melding Ethiopian and Colombian music and more is “somewhat left field,” but he says the project is “landing okay with those who have engaged with it. When I would show Ethiopian music to Colombian musicians and they would listen to it, like it, and want to dance to it, it gave me confidence that the concept is understandable. I do make music for myself first and foremost and that helps alleviate any trepidation or concern around it being understandable.”
Zekarias would love to play the music live — but there are a number of challenges on top of the current pandemic. Ararat and his group Chontadelia are scheduled to come to DC in 2022, and Zekarias wants to be on the bill with him then.
But Zekarias is also making a huge change himself — he’s going to study ethnomusicology formally, not just practice it. Inspired by the 2019 Library of Congress song challenge he participated in where he found historic music from Ethiopia and the Pacific coast of Colombia in the Library archives and then performed it with a band, he applied and now has been accepted into the Boston University graduate school program to study ethnomusicology under Dr. Michael Birenbaum Quintero, an Afro-Colombian music specialist. Zekarias plans on later returning to the Washington DC area.
As for those looking to hear Colombian music in DC post-Covid, Zekarias notes that while there are no locally based Afro-Colombian bands playing the exact sounds he loves, there are two DC area based Colombian groups that incorporate some of his favorite elements. Zekarias’ friend Celestino Leon Barrera plays percussion in La Colombopercutivo. Female combo La Marvela also performs locally. (Both have played Bossa.) Finally, Afro-Colombian filmmaker Leonardo Rua, who lives in the area, filmed a beautifully shot “Biyya Chonta” video, and sometimes plays guitar at DC clubs. Ethiopian music can be heard locally at Bossa, and other clubs in Silver Spring, Arlington, and Falls Church. Referring to his passion for Afro-Colombian music, his study plans, the friends that he has made, and his recording in Colombia, “all of this came from just going to Adams Morgan and hearing music.”
