What do forty Armenian orphans, a would-be aerospace engineer, a French musicologist and a Marxist military junta have in common?
They all play an important role in the history of Ethio-jazz, one of Africa’s most innovative music genres, shaped by migration, political turmoil and determination.
When Haile Selassie – then crown prince of Ethiopia – toured Europe and the Middle East in 1924 in search of new political allies and partnerships, nobody expected that this journey would spark a revolution in the country’s music scene for the years to come. During his time in Jerusalem, Selassie visited an Armenian monastery, where a brass band comprised of 40 orphaned survivors of the Armenian genocide played a concert to honor his arrival. The prince was so impressed that he invited the band to live in Addis Ababa. And so the Arba Lijoch (Amharic for Forty Children), along with their bandleader, Kevork Nalbandian, embarked to Ethiopia to become the country’s first official orchestra, playing at nearly every imperial event. Nalbandian later composed Ethiopia Hoy, a song that later became the country’s official anthem from Selassie’s coronation in 1930 up until 1974. But it’s not the anthem that the Forty Children are most remembered for. It’s the introduction of brass instruments, which were not used in Ethiopian music before, and which revolutionized the sounds of the African country. Nalbandian and his orchestra later trained military and imperial bodyguard bands, solidifying the position of Western instruments in Ethiopia’s musical landscape. Later, Nalbandian’s nephew, Nerses, continued his work, becoming the director of the Haile Selassie National Theater and training musicians like Alemayehu Eshete and Tilahun Gessesse, both of whom later went on to become successful singers. The Nalbandians, both directly and indirectly, laid the foundation for modern Ethiopian music.
While the Nalbandians modernized the country’s instrumental range, the world of Ethio-jazz came into existence on account of a man by the name of Mulatu Astatke. “The grandfather of Ethiopian jazz”, as he later came to be known, left the country at the age of 16, sent to Wales by his family to study aerospace engineering. However, instead of becoming an engineer, the young Mulatu became enamored with music, which ultimately led him to abandon science and study in the Trinity College of Music in London, while playing in clubs and dance halls on the side. Then, in 1963, he became the first African student of the only jazz school in the world at the time – the Berklee College of Music in Boston. After finishing his studies and moving to New York for a few years, Mulatu returned to Ethiopia, bringing with him more Western instruments that were yet unknown in the country at the time – the Rhodes piano, the vibraphone and the wah-wah guitar pedal. With this arsenal, he went on to combine traditional Qenet (secular Amhara pentatonic scales) and rhythms with jazz techniques he learned in the West, giving birth to what became known as Ethio-jazz. Although some were skeptical of this combination, Mulatu went on to partner with Amha Eshete, the founder of Ethiopia’s first independent record label, which popularized his music all around the country, paving the way for other musicians who later emerged in the genre.
The period between the late 60s and early 70s is often referred to as the Golden Age of Ethiopian music. Even before Mulatu returned to his home country, the musical revolution was in full swing, later earning the country’s capital the nickname of “Swinging Addis”. However, this revolution was overshadowed by another, political one. In 1974 a Marxist military group called the Derg (Amharic for ‘council’) overthrew Haile Selassie, consolidating power in Ethiopia. What ensued was a long period of terror, famine and turmoil. The imposition of a curfew and persecution of musicians and record labels effectively killed the nightlife and forced many into exile. Those who stayed cultivated the Ethiopian poetic tradition of wax and gold, the usage of double-layered meaning in order to hide the real meaning of their lyrics. Some of the remaining jazzmen were also forced to perform in communist countries, one of them being Alemayehu Eshete, who recounts his experience performing for Kim Il Sung in a Guardian article1. Mulatu also stayed in Ethiopia, teaching music and, at some point, visiting Havana due to Derg’s good relations with the Castro government.
While Ethiopia was occupied with the Derg regime, a French musicologist and world music enthusiast by the name of Francis Falceto discovered Ahmed Mahmoud’s LP while programming world music for Le Confort Moderne in Poitiers. He immediately became enthralled with Mahmoud’s music, leading him to visit Ethiopia for the first time in 1984 with the objective of recruiting the singer to tour in Europe. Despite his efforts proving futile, he managed to meet the singer, who introduced him to the world of Ethio-jazz. Falceto was captivated, and returned to Ethiopia multiple times to collect the country’s vanishing music media, and, in 1986, to reissue Mahmoud’s album. Eventually, in 1998, Falceto went on to publish the first volume of Éthiopiques, which came to be a series of CD’s compiling Ethiopian music, especially from, but not limited to, the Golden Age. As of today, there are 30 published volumes, but one of them was especially pivotal to popularization of the genre. Éthiopiques Volume 4: Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale, released in 1998, was a collection of Mulatu Astatke’s music, which found its way into Jim Jarmusch’s 2005 movie Broken Flowers. This exposed Western audiences to Ethio-jazz for the first time, popularizing the genre outside of Ethiopia.
Today, Ethio-jazz is gaining even more popularity, with many of the musicians touring the world and headlining world music festivals. And although the story of the genre is one of success, we must not forget that it is a one of struggle, migration, and, in part, sheer chance.
Maks Kosman
Sources
1 Spencer, N. (2008) Out of Africa, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/may/18/jazz.worldmusic
2 Dahl, S. (2017) Mulatu Astatke at Cosmopolite, https://sebastiandahl.com/blog/20171110-mulatu-astatke-at-cosmopolite