241: Éthiopiques, Vol. 21: Ethiopia Song, by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou

Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou (Ethiopia)
Éthiopiques, Vol. 21: Ethiopia Song (2006)
16 tracks, 74 minutes
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We’re back with another volume of the legendary Éthiopiques series. The series is mostly known for digging out the best in the classic era of Ethiopian jazz, soul and funk, but Volume 21 is different from any other. That’s because the music of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou is entirely unique.

As with so much of the best music, hers is simple yet so complex. It’s all solo piano. There’s nothing outwardly virtuosic about her playing, but there doesn’t need to be. Every note she plays is perfect. The languid rubato, the ever-so-slight pause that she takes on some notes all give every key press a real weight and sincerity behind them.

All sixteen of these pieces are her own compositions, and no-one else writes piano music like her. Emahoy Guèbrou is completely devoted to her life as an Ethiopian orthodox nun (Emahoy is equivalent to the English ‘Sister’), and her music is deeply indebted to that devotion. From her fingers come the sound of the giant begana lyre and the solemn chants of psalms, with their connections to the ancient Ethiopian scales and rhythms, but when translated through the piano (and her time studying European classical music before her sisterly vows), it becomes something different.

I hear so much in those flowing runs and playful tinkles. There’s a real impressionist vibe, all washed-out and dappled with sunlight and shade like the best of Debussy and Chopin. I even hear some unexpected things too – zydeco and kora melodies echo in the swirls of notes, entirely in my own head, I’m sure. Above all, it is relentless in its gentleness. I evoke water metaphors a lot, but I hear it so strongly in Emahoy Guèbrou’s music. It trickles and it gushes, it swells and wanes like waves, always calm but with an ocean’s worth of awesome but benevolent power behind each note.

The recordings that make up this compilation were recorded between 1963 and 1996 (by which time she had moved to a hermitage in Jerusalem, where she lives to this day), and that wide span just shows the timelessness of her work. Emahoy Guèbrou’s music is unique because it is her own; no-one could have come up with the style because it is her own life story told in washes of sound. In the last decade or so, people have begun to wake up to the genius of this music, but none can capture the same immense beauty of her own playing. In a small, simple room in Jerusalem, surrounded by holy symbols, a nun in her mid-90s is playing music that will resonate for a long, long time.