351: Sitotash, by Shewandagne Hailu

Shewandagne Hailu (Ethiopia)
Sitotash (2013)
15 tracks, 72 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

You can’t escape pop music. After all, it is, by definition, popular. Wherever you go in the world, you’re going to hear the biggest pop of the moment, and it’s usually all cut from the same stylistic cloth. In Ethiopia, things are no different. Pop music is absolutely everywhere – booming out of taxis, buses, cafés, and mobile phones from every direction. And if you’re big in Ethiopia, you’re huge.

In August of 2013, Addis Ababa belonged to Shewandagne Hailu. His album Sitotash had just come out and his face was on billboards and posters all across the city. Also, I was there. Of course, one of the first things I did after familiarising myself with the general layout of Addis was to hunt out some music, and my expedition led me to a stall on a main road that was just floor-to-ceiling CDs. With so much choice and no idea what I actually wanted, I took a shot in the dark and asked the bloke who was presiding over his stock if he had any jazz. Having already seen the adverts all over, I wasn’t too surprised when the guy confidently slapped a copy of Sitotash down onto the counter.

Nor was I particularly surprised when I’d returned to London, stuck the CD on to discover it wasn’t jazz at all – I mean, look at that cover. In fact, I recognised it. When it got to the track ‘Siberber’, I knew why: it had seemed like every single radio station in Ethiopia was playing that track as every other song, to the extent that it essentially became the soundtrack to my whole time there.

And what does it sound like? It’s pop! Cheesy, cheesy pop. You know the sort. All sorts of keyboard sounds, electric guitars in Brian May-mode, disco beats, loads of reverb, key changes. There’s quite a strong reggae lean to most of the tracks, too, which is quite common in Ethiopian pop. And that’s the thing. There’s no mistaking Ethiopian pop, in the same way as there’s no mistaking Ethiopian jazz or reggae or electronica or metal. There’s something that’s so unmistakably Ethiopian about it. Not just the language, either. Usually it’s in the melodies: traditional Ethiopian music deals with a unique set of pentatonic scales called qiñit, and those scales are used across the musical spectrum, making the music instantly recognisable. Sometimes that’s not the case though, but even when Shewandagne Hailu uses eight-note scales in a western major-or-minor key, his music still sounds as if it could be made nowhere else but Ethiopia. How that happens…well, I have no idea. But I love it.

Pop music is all over the world – some of it is actually good! – but that doesn’t mean it all sounds the same. It comes in different flavours wherever it comes from, and Ethiopian pop has one of the most distinctive (and tastiest) flavours out there. And if you want yours with extra cheese, Shewandagne Hailu is your order.

257: Punt – Made in Ethiopia, by Invisible System

Invisible System (United Kingdom/Ethiopia)
Punt – Made in Ethiopia (2009)
12 tracks, 64 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Albums with lots of guests are usually a mixed bag – of qualities as well as styles. Just like with supergroups, it seems pretty accurate that the number of big names involved in the album-making process has a direct correlation with the likelihood that it comes out limp at the end of it. So when the back of the CD case for this album lists guest slots from no fewer than 19 musicians, you’d probably be forgiven for your misgivings. On the other hand, there’s me seeing the names Mahmoud Ahmed, Justin Adams, Juldeh Camara, Samuel Yirga, Count Dubulah, Mimi Zenebe, Neil Perch and Martin Craddick and just getting too exciting to hear all of their musical brains working together. What can I say, it’s a drug.

Luckily, with Invisible System guiding the ship, it all works to make an enjoyable trip (well, for the most part). Invisible System is the musicking moniker of Dan Harper, who works within electronica, dub and trance to create intelligent but dance-heavy fusions with African music. As an environmental worker, Harper lived for spells in both Ethiopia and Mali, two intensely musical cultures, and dove into the music scenes of both places, learning ways, making contacts and recording as much as possible. The Invisible System discography shows close work with musicians of both cultures, but for this first official release, it is Ethiopian music that takes the fore.

And, yes, it works. Maybe the track-by-track quality does fluctuate a little bit because of the supergroupification, but on the whole, the contributions of the Ethiopian musicians gel really well with Harper’s dubtronica, and it’s especially exciting when it bends towards the proggier side of things too. Because when this album hits its stride, it really hits. The third track, ‘Melkam Kehonelish’, is a stand-out for me. It brings together the old and new guards of Ethiopian jazz (legendary singer Mahmoud Ahmed and pianist Samuel Yirga, respectively), sticks Justin Adams providing trippy, atmospheric guitar in the background with Harper’s electronics providing a brooding dub – and bonus points for a wailing sax solo, the identity of whose performer evades me.

Harper himself is very vocal in reminding people that it was as part of the Invisible System project that Count Dubulah first connected with Ethiopian musicians, the meeting that eventually led to the creation of Dub Colossus. That Ethio-dub outfit ended up far eclipsing Invisible System in terms of popularity and success, and Harper’s perceived lack of recognition on the part of Dubulah remains an obvious sore point that seems to make its way to any mention of Invisible System’s output (although I’m sure Harper wouldn’t be happy with me putting it that way). I’ll be honest that it puts me off a little bit – for this project to be tainted with a palpable bitterness on the part of its main creator is a disservice. Nevertheless, it shouldn’t take anything away from the album’s most important aspect – its music. To turn the improvised jams of 20-odd musicians into an album that is not just coherent but tightly structured while still allowing a free-flow of creative ideas is an impressive feat that should not be overlooked.

251: Gili Yalo, by Gili Yalo

Gili Yalo (Israel/Ethiopia)
Gili Yalo (2017)
10 tracks, 41 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Diaspora music as a concept is something I find extremely interesting. The experiences of people who have grown up in one culture and living in a different one, or to have been born and raised by people of one culture while in the geographies of another, lend them a unique outlook on the world and a unique approach to the meanings and makings of music.

Gili Yalo’s self-titled debut album is a great reflection of that. Born to a Jewish family in Ethiopia, his family travelled by foot to the refugee camps in Sudan to escape religious persecution when Yalo was five years old. From there, he was brought to Tel Aviv as part of Israel’s Operation Moses. And so, growing up, he was immersed in Israeli life, and music: he listened to all the popular Israeli singers, and became addicted to funk, soul, rock and reggae from the Americas. He had little time for Ethiopian culture; it was, after all, the country that rejected him and his people. But then, a little older, he started to notice the systematic and structural prejudice against Ethiopian Jews in Israel. He got angry, and his anger manifested in refusing to be put down by racism, but to rise from it: he began to embrace his Ethiopian heritage like he hadn’t before. He polished up his Amharic and started listening to as much Ethiopian music as he could, mostly from the Éthiopiques series (as have we, here and here). “I discovered lively, exciting music with impressive progressions…on one hand, the beats are very, very authentic and characteristic of Ethiopia, and on the other hand, the scale is very minor – sad songs with a beat, and people dance as if there were no tomorrow. I connected with this music,” he later told Haaretz.

He was already a musician, but this dive into Ethiopian jazz and other styles from the 60s and 70s changed the way he thought about music, and when he went solo, it was obvious what direction he would take. His music reflects that cross-cultural life. Vintage Ethiogroove is at the heart of most of the tracks on Gili Yalo, but when he allows his other influences to take the fore, they come with as much skill, love and deep understanding, meaning that no matter which direction the album takes, it’s always down the grooviest avenue possible.

I’ve been following Gili Yalo for about six years now, just as he’d started to pick up steam as a solo artist. It was a little scrappy at first, but by the time this album came out, his sound was honed to perfection. When I reviewed it for Songlines at the time, I said ‘Play it loud and you’ll feel like the coolest person alive – after Gili Yalo, of course,’ and listening back to it almost two years later, I can confirm that it’s still the case. After keeping him on my radar for so long, it was great to see him live at WOMAD in July – his first ever UK date; he smashed it, of course, but that was expected. Listen to this debut album and revel in it: it was a whole life in the making.

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
Spotify ∙ iTunes

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.

201: Love Songs, Vol. 2, by Yishak Banjaw

Yishak Banjaw (Ethiopia)
Love Songs, Vol. 2 (1986/2016)
8 tracks, 46 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ iTunes

When I first heard this it blew my mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I certainly couldn’t stop telling people about it, and playing it to anyone foolish enough to stand still next to me for enough time for me to get me iPod out. I’d listened to a lot of Ethiopian music before – and even been there myself – so when I was asked to review another Ethiopian album (one called Love Songs, no less), I thought I knew what was coming. Obviously I did not.

Yishak Banjaw’s music is traditionally Ethiopian in its scales, its rhythms and its composition. The only thing he really does differently is play it all on a Casio PT keyboard with enthusiastic use of all the various synth options and some programmed beats. And it seems to change it completely. There are similarities with Charanjit Singh’s 10 Ragas to a Disco Beat in terms of the story of how the records came to be and the way they were made, but whereas the Indian record came out sounding like acid house five years before that even became a thing, Banjaw’s music gives me realｖａｐｏｒｗａｖｅtingles.

Everything about this record sounds a little off-kilter. It’s all ever-so-slightly warped and washed out, and there’s a hiss from the tape transfer, which all lend a faintly unsettling vibe to it in a way that is hard to pinpoint. As all the synths swirl together in those unmistakably Ethiopian shapes while using the alien-sounding timbres, your mind gets dragged along into the maelstrom, having the same effect as the hypnotist’s spiral.

I really love this album and its retro vibes, but what’s really exciting is that I just found out he’s still making music and releasing albums as late as 2017, and they’ve not stopped being any less enigmatically cool as his work from the 80s. Check this shit out. The synths are more modern, the sound is a little cleaner and the sensibility is slightly more to the pop side of things, but it’s so good to hear that he’s still making his unique music three decades later. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some more Ｅｔｈｉｏｐｉａｎｗａｖｅ to catch up on…

172: Unknown tape, by Hirut Bekele

Hirut Bekele (Ethiopia)
Unknown tape
12 tracks, 59 minutes
Listen and download at Awesome Tapes from Africa

Here’s a difficult one: how do you write about an album you have no idea what it is? No title, no date, no track names. All I know is that it is by the singer Hirut Bekele. Let’s try.

The version of this tape that I have – and that you can have too, courtesy of Awesome Tapes from Africa – is not good quality at all, it’s fuzzy, muddy and a little distorted, but the standard of the music cannot help but shine through. The ensemble is three, as Hirut’s voice is backed by just an electronic organ and a krar lyre; the sound is actually quite sparse in most places, but if anything, that only serves to highlight Hirut’s captivating voice. Her singing is quite understated in a way, it’s sweet and soulful, but she can’t half belt it out when she needs to, and put on quite an attitude when she wants to.

I find these recordings most spellbinding when the pieces are based on the more semitone-rich scales such as those on tracks 2, 5 and 9, which use the scales of anchihoye, a variation on bati (with a major seventh), and ambassel, respectively, for all you musicologists out there (a handy guide to the Ethiopian qeñet scales can be found on this website). And then there’s the wild, guttural introduction to track 11, which I think harkens to the vocalisations of eskista dancers, but it come out of the blue and doesn’t come back, either. There’s a lot of lightly strange things about this tape, and I love it.

It’s so hard to find any information about Hirut Bekele, though. When I visited Ethiopia, I tried asking in every music shop about recordings by her. No-one had any, although they all remarked on what a legend she was. One of them told me it’s because of some confusing legal matters about who owned the recordings, that when she died, the licenses were inherited by someone unexpected or something, but I find that a strange excuse, especially seeing as Ethiopia’s music trade seems to be almost exclusively run on pirated copies. Who knows what’s going on? Either way, I would love to know – and hear – more about Hirut and her music, a legend with a fantastic voice but an enigmatic profile.

113: Éthiopiques, Vol. 4: Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale, 1969-1974, by Mulatu Astatke

Mulatu Astatke (Ethiopia)
Éthiopiques, Vol. 4: Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale, 1969-1974 (1998)
14 tracks, 66 minutes
Spotify • iTunes

Ethiopian music from the 60s and 70s has perhaps been one of the most unexpected success stories in 21st century music. Prior to the turn of the century, the music from what is now known as ‘Swinging Addis,’ the golden age of Ethiopian music, was only really known to Ethiopians and a handful of international enthusiasts. Then the Éthiopiques album series began picking up steam; music from the series was used in films and as samples in hip-hop music, and then in 2007 there was the compilation The Very Best of Éthiopiques and suddenly it was everywhere. Every half-way hip city had its own handful of bands playing covers of Ethiopian golden age hits and composing in their own style, and all the old masters of that time were touring far and wide and collaborating with all sorts of different musicians.

The sound that encapsulated the boom was Ethiojazz. It became a buzzword that was used to refer to all of the myriad styles at play during the Swinging Addis period, but Ethiojazz only ever really referred to the music of one man, Mulatu Astatke. Until recently, Ethiojazz was a style all his own, his unique brand of jazz that took the grooves and instrumentation of post-bop and added the rhythms and percussion of the Latin Caribbean and turned it all to sheer magic by basing all the melodies and chords on the traditional five-note qeñet that makes Ethiopian music sound like nothing else.

This fourth volume of the Éthiopiques series reintroduced Mulatu’s Ethiojazz to the world, and it sent that world crazy. There are many different ensembles on this disc, and the tracks were recorded over many different sessions, in both Ethiopia and the US, but they’re all connected by Mulatu’s presence – by his vision, his compositions, his skills as an arranger and bandleader and his contributions on vibraphone, electric piano and percussion.

After this album came out, Mulatu had a proper resurgence that continues to this day. He’s worked with artists from all over the world and recorded several new albums, but as a compilation of his most fruitful period, Éthiopiques, Vol. 4 is basically perfect, and every track that it includes is infectious in its own way; it even created hits of several pieces including ‘Yègellé Tezeta’, ‘Yèkèrmo Sèw’ and ‘Yèkatit.’ Ethiojazz isn’t just for Ethiopians anymore, and that global appeal wouldn’t have been possible without the music of Mulatu Astatke.