By Neil Spencer | The Observer
‘There have been very difficult times. Harsh times, when it was frankly hell to be here, but some of us were lucky and survived. Thank God. Now this place’ – Alemayehu Eshete gestures towards the shimmering sprawl of Addis Ababa below the terrace where we are sitting – ‘is finally getting noticed.’
Alemayehu Eshete, the James Brown of Ethiopia
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On cue, a giant truck laden with bricks and builders gives a mighty honk and rumbles past in an evil cloud of dust and diesel, en route to one of the many construction sites springing up in Ethiopia’s capital. Equally on cue, a flock of goats trots anarchically past, whipped into unruly order by their owner, forcing a shining Toyota 4×4 to a halt. Addis is a city of contrasts, where the future and the past rub constantly, uncomfortably, against each other.
The same might be said of Alemayehu himself. At 60 years of age the singer has lived out a career that has taken him from teenage Elvis impersonator to national stardom as Ethiopia’s answer to James Brown, from singing under duress for North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung in the Eighties to his trans-American tours of today, playing for the booming Ethiopian communities of Washington DC, Atlanta and beyond. Twenty-first century Ethiopia, it transpires, extends way beyond Africa.
Later this month, Ashete’s career begins a more unexpected chapter when he and three other veterans from Addis’s ‘Golden Age’ play London’s Barbican as part of the venue’s ‘Groove Nations’ programme. Then the quartet headline Glastonbury’s Saturday night jazz stage. Alemayehu declares himself unphased at the prospect of wowing the Glasto faithful – after what he and his country have endured, you sense he’s unshockable – but he admits that he and his colleagues are pleasantly astonished to find the music they pioneered in the early Seventies is now in first-world vogue.
And what vogue. The Very Best of Éthiopiques was 2007’s cult hit, swathed in press plaudits, endorsed by Robert Plant and Elvis Costello – who hailed its ‘soulful, sorrowful and joyful music’ and ‘defiant human spirit’ – and widely tipped to ‘do for Ethiopia what the Buena Vista Social Club did for Cuba’. A tall order indeed.
A mixture of rugged funk, mesmeric jazz, blousy soul and harp-drenched folk, the 28 tracks of The Very Best are distilled from the series of 23 Éthiopiques albums that is the brainchild of Francis Falceto, a French promoter turned musical curator. Falceto’s series and its Very Best microcosm capture the flowering of Ethiopian pop during the fading years of Emperor Haile Selassie’s reign, a brief, gilded age before a bloodthirsty Communist military junta closed down the country for 18 years, silencing its music in the process.
Today Addis is once more a boom town. Downtown, mammoth new buildings are rising, the concrete skeletons of new five-star hotels sheathed in rickety wooden scaffolding. The city’s ramshackle roads are likewise being upgraded and carry a surprising number of flashy Merecedes saloons and Japanese jeeps alongside flotillas of rickety Lada taxis and bright blue minibuses spewing out black clouds of half-digested diesel, pictures of Arsenal or Barcelona FC stuck in their windows.
Where all this smart money is coming from is something no one seems able or willing to say. Dubai is mentioned, and the cheerful Chinese businessmen in the city’s pizza parlours tell another part of the story, but the principal source of the new wealth seems to be first-world aid. Not the humanitarian aid that pulled the country’s northern provinces out of famine back in Live Aid days, but politically inspired investment. Ethiopia is, after all, a devoutly Christian country in a region where Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise.
As headquarters to the African Union, Addis is already the de facto political capital of Africa, a place where business is done among governments, aid agencies and pressure groups. How much the city’s burgeoning role will benefit its endless shanty towns remains to be seen, but some of the political gloss is already rubbing off on the city’s culture. Last year Beyoncé Knowles chose Addis for the opening date of her world tour – at the city’s cavernous Millennium Hall. VIP tickets cost 4,000 Birra (£200), a colossal sum for most Ethiopians, though much of the audience were students with free tickets.
The signs of a musical and artistic revival don’t stop there. Out beyond the old leper hospital on the city’s fringes I visit a spacious art gallery opened last year, whose paintings are selling for a healthy £2,000 apiece. Downtown there are swish, cosmopolitan bars and jazz venues like Club Alize, alongside the rootsier tedjbets, drinking holes where all manner of bluesy, folky music is played. Some of this activity is driven by the return of exiles and expatriates, especially from the USA. Various figures are bandied around for the number of Ethiopians in the States, with a million as a mean average, of whom around 100,000 are resident in Washington DC alone.
Though the music you hear pumping from the tape decks of lorries and taxis might include the odd blast of American R and B or rap, it’s local stars who dominate with tunes laced with synths but still chiming with the odd harmonies of East Africa – pin-up Teddy Afro, or the hugely popular Gossaye Tesfaye.
For the moment, though, it is the music of the past that is attracting the attention of the West. Éthiopiques gathers an array of talents, among them singer Mahmoud Ahmed, who lifted a BBC World award last year, Alemayehu Eshete, saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya, and ‘Ethio-jazz’ bandleader Mulatu Astatke. It’s these four who are heading for Europe, backed by the US jazz troupe Ether Orchestra.
The album’s totem tracks probably belong to Mulatu, not least because his spellbinding music featured heavily in the soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch’s 2005 comedy-drama Broken Flowers. Jarmusch had become entranced by Astake’s discordant brass and quavering keyboards after hearing the Éthiopiques 4 release dedicated to him. So entranced that the director searched out Astatke in New York, then wrote an Ethiopian character into the movie to accommodate his music.
Astatke, a solemn, well-spoken 64-year-old, is a very different personality to the effervescent Eshete. I catch up with him before a triumphant show at the Cargo club in London, where he is brilliantly backed by local jazzers the Heliocentrics. Coming from a well-off family, he was packed off to boarding school in Wrexham, where he first developed an interest in music, learning trumpet and clarinet. After moving to London to study music at Trinity College, he became interested in classical and jazz, and was quickly sucked into the capital’s musical life, playing for Latin bandleader Edmundo Ros and absorbing Soho’s jazz scene. ‘It was a thrilling time,’ he says. ‘I became great friends with [club owner] Ronnie Scott and met a lot of talented players – Tubby Hayes in particular, who played both tenor sax and vibes. It was Tubby who first inspired me to take up vibes.’
After a spell at Berklee College in Boston, Astatke founded the Ethiopian Quintet in New York, making his first album in 1966 and returning home at the end of the decade. It was the era of ‘Swinging Addis’. An ageing Haile Selassie still ruled the country like a feudal monarch but the Ethiopian capital had loosened up under the sway of the younger generation and the tides of internationalism. Alongside Ethiopian music the state radio broadcast soul music, much of it introduced via young American peace corps.
In Addis’s downtown hotels resident big bands in crisp tuxedos pumped out a brash fusion of American soul and Amharic pop for a sophisticated audience – then, as now, Addis had an affluent upper class and was an international capital. In the new mood of youthful discontent, even the state monopoly on recording and importing records found itself challenged by an uppity 24-year-old record shop owner, Amha Eshèté. Recording in his back room and sending his tapes to India for pressing, Amha Records’ first release was by Alemayehu Eshete.
For Alemayehu, speaking on a hotel terrace in Addis, where he still lives, such times are both distant and oddly present. ‘We got away with our defiance,’ says Alemayehu, ‘then the Philips label, who had the monopoly, got in on the act, some others too.’
As lead singer with the Police Band, Alemayehu was already a star turn. Not that he was actually in the police force – Ethiopia’s music scene had been largely generated through the various marching bands that had begun in the Forties on the Emperor’s orders. On a visit to Turkey, Selassie had been greeted and impressed by an Armenian brass band and had promptly inaugurated his own musical strike force. Armenian instructors were drafted in and a host of official bands founded, the most eminent being the Imperial Bodyguard Band. Later, the Bodyguard band would fall from grace, when several members were implicated in 1960’s attempted coup.
‘The bands would hire singers, players and dancers,’ relates Alemayehu, who was well known even at school for his cover versions of Elvis Presley. ‘You can’t start from nothing, you have to start from something, and I had watched a lot of Elvis movies. I dressed like an American, grew my hair, sang “Jailhouse Rock” and “Teddy Bear” – sometimes we would do “Strangers in the Night”.’ At this he laughs and gives a creditable croon. ‘But the moment that I started singing Amharic songs my popularity shot up.’
By the time Alemayehu was making records, James Brown had replaced Elvis as his principal influence. ‘Sam Cooke, Brook Benton, Bobby Bland, Nat King Cole… I loved them all, but James was the greatest.’
Listening to the Éthiopiques series, it’s easy to think that black America had more of an influence on Ethiopia than turns out to be the case. It’s not much of a step, for example, from the cosmic jazz of Sun Ra to the mysterious sounds of Mulatu Astatke, or from the primal free jazz saxophone of Albert Ayler to the visceral warrior wails of Getatchew Mekurya. After all, in the era when Addis briefly flourished, black America was turning increasingly to the ‘motherland’ for inspiration, sporting Afro haircuts and dashikis, its jazz champions cutting records called ‘Black Nile’ or ‘Home is Africa’.
For confirmation, I hand Alemayehu a new Blue Note compilation, African Rhythms: Afrocentric Homages to a Spiritual Homeland, featuring the likes of Lee Morgan and Wayne Shorter. After inspecting it he shakes his head, bemused. ‘We weren’t aware of this at all,’ he says.
Even Mulatu, a sophisticated international, turns out to have been unaware of the rippling electronic keyboards of Sun Ra that so much resemble his own. His principal western inspirations were, he says, the orchestral styles of Gil Evans and Duke Ellington – the latter he famously met and worked with when the Ellington band was touring Africa, staying a few days in Addis. Mulatu wrote an arrangement for the Duke, using Ethiopian notation. ‘He was surprised – he said he wasn’t expecting an African to come up with something like that.’
In a country where the voice rules music and lyrics count for a great deal (often saying one thing and meaning another), Mulatu’s instrumental music has never been especially popular, though his arrangements for others, notably singer Tlahoun Gèssèssè, are much admired. Mulatu was responsible for introducing instruments like Fender keyboards, wah-wah pedals, vibes, organs. A musical scholar who is a fellow at Harvard, Mulatu likes to talk technically about the distinctive qualities of Ethiopian music and its use of the five-note pentatonic scale rather than the West’s eight-note scale. He’ll compare the diminished scales used by Ethiopian tribes to Debussy’s, and explain how he melded chants from the Coptic Church, which traces its origins back to at least the third century, into his arrangements.
All Ethiopians, it seems, have a well-developed sense of their country’s uniqueness, be it in their music, religion, language (Amharic is a one-off) or history. Of all the African nations, Ethiopia alone remained independent of the European colonial land grab of the 19th century, keeping its ancient royal line intact down to the overthrow of Haile Selassie in the revolution of 1974.
Selassie’s downfall remains an ambiguous moment for many Ethiopians. Though widely admired by outsiders as a symbol of African stability and even modernity, at home the Emperor was an unpopular autocrat – one of the biggest hits of 1973 was ‘I Can’t Take It Anymore’, a political slogan disguised as a love song.
‘We couldn’t be open in what we sang,’ says Alemayehu, ‘because there was no democracy. Most of the people were against the government because the law wasn’t straight. The king had become old and ministers were just doing what they liked. Still, it was 100 per cent better than what came after…’
Swinging Addis stopped rocking abruptly in 1974 when widespread street protests and anti-government strikes opened the way for a military coup. Headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Communist junta – the ‘Derg’ – imprisoned Selassie, cracked down on dissenters and imposed a night-time curfew that silenced Addis’s nightlife. Amid civil unrest at home, the Derg pursued old enmities against its neighbours – Eritrea, Somalia, Tigray – coming close to defeat in the process, and being saved only by massive military intervention from Soviet and Cuban forces.
For the next couple of years, Ethiopia was plunged into a campaign of ‘Red Terror’ as dissent was ruthlessly suppressed. Military and civilian murder squads roamed the country eradicating ‘enemies of the revolution’, and thousands died or were imprisoned as Mengistu established a ‘Socialist Paradise’. In reality the country was turned into a prison and Mengistu into a Stalinist caricature of an emperor who was by then dead, his body buried beneath a toilet in the palace from which Mengistu now held sway.
Many musicians were among those who fled into exile. Others remained, though unable to perform more than the odd state-sponsored show or sneak the occasional cassette recording through the cultural clampdown. ‘That time was hell,’ says Alemayehu, simply. ‘A lot of people were detained and killed, though not me, I was still popular and even some of the Derg liked me.’
Alemayehu found himself pressed into state service, under government orders to play prestige shows in other African countries or on occasion for allies like Cuba, Russia and North Korea. ‘I was ordered to sing a song in Korean for Kim Il Sung, which I learned, though I had no idea what I was singing. At the theatre people stood up and started clapping for no apparent reason – it was because the president had left his home and was on his way to the show. The applause didn’t stop until he was sat down.’
The 10th anniversary of the Derg’s accession to power in 1984 was accompanied by lavish, Soviet-style celebrations – parades, gymnastic displays, triumphal arches and monuments – though these were soon overshadowed by the calamitous famine that gripped the country’s north. The extent of the tragedy, in which hundreds of thousands of peasants and refugees starved, was at first concealed by Mengistu. When the world’s television screens eventually revealed the unfolding catastrophe, a deluge of humanitarian aid flowed in, led by Band Aid and the following summer’s Live Aid concert.
Though drought and a failed harvest had much to do with the famine, Mengistu was also culpable. Agricultural collectivisation and the scorched earth tactics used by the military against Tigrayan independence fighters also played their part in the tragedy, while the £150m raised by Live Aid was roughly equivalent to the sum lavished by Mengistu on his anniversary celebrations.
For the outside world, the words ‘Ethiopia’ and ‘famine’ became inseparable. For Francis Falceto, the force behind Éthiopiques, this has been a tragedy of a lesser order. ‘The images of the famine on people’s TV screens implanted the idea that Ethiopia was a desert where people die of hunger, whereas most of the country is green, fertile uplands. I wanted to show that Ethiopians were a cultured people, not incompetent beggars who couldn’t feed themselves. I wanted the Éthiopiques series to help break this cliche and change the West’s perception.’
A quixotic figure who ‘has aways been drawn to unknown and experimental music’, the 56-year-old Falceto is an eloquent and inspirational figure, a mover and shaker whose devotion to Ethiopian music underpins much of what has happened over the past decade. He made his first visit to Ethiopia in 1984. A promoter and champion of experimental music, he had fallen in love with a Mahmoud Ahmed record a friend had given him. He decided to visit Addis in the hope of recruiting Ahmed for a European tour. The city he found was a ghost town with his – and everyone else’s – move monitored. ‘I had never been to Africa so it was very frightening and very hard work.’
Falceto’s plans to tour Mahmoud came to nothing, but he met the star, and his brief taste of Addis had him hooked. He began to visit regularly, building up a library of the country’s vanishing musical legacy. ‘I bought every cassette and 45 I could get my hands on, rooting round dusty stalls and back street shops, and befriending the label owners.’ The results of his obsession appeared in 1997, when the first of his beautifully presented Éthiopiques albums was released.
By then the Derg was history, overthrown in a 1991 coup led by the country’s current prime minister Meles Zenawi. Since then Ethiopia has made a stumbling transition into a neo-democracy – the 2005 elections, for example, led to a police massacre of 190 dissenters and the imprisonment of Zenawi’s rivals. Military action against independence movements in Ogaden and Somalia continues amid allegations of human rights abuses.
‘Whatever you think of the current regime, at least musicians are allowed to play what and where they want,’ says Falceto, who for the last few years has been promoting an annual festival in Addis. His co-promoter, Heruy Arefaire, grew up in Washington and returned to a homeland he hadn’t known as an adult. He talks passionately about the ‘Addis Acoustic Renaissance’, and the revival of instruments like clarinet, accordion and mandolin that were once fixtures in Ethiopian music.
This year’s Addis festival included a French jazz group from Toulouse, Les Tigres des Platanes, whose repertoire covers Fela Kuti, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and assorted Ethiopian tracks. Falceto plans to record them alongside Ethiopian singer Etenesh Wassie.
In general, however, Falceto is gloomy about the state of Ethiopian music, which by the time he visited the country had declined into gloop synth players in hotel lounges. ‘Imagine you were 17 in 1974 – for 18 years you couldn’t go anywhere – by the time the regime falls and the curfew ends in 1991 you are 35. That means that no one in that country under 50 has a real folk memory of the glory days of Ethiopian music.’
Yet the country’s appetite for its own brand of pop hasn’t disappeared. Roadside stalls selling bootleg CDs do a brisk trade, and the growing American Ethiopian population provides an eager audience for visitors, and for a growing number of Ethiopian acts, like singers Gigi and Aster Awake, who are based in North America, and who have started to fuse tradition with new flavours.
For Falceto, the Éthiopiques ‘project’, as he calls it, is ongoing. There are more old records to re-release, but you sense that the archaeological phase is over. The sleeping giants whose music he brought to the world are now playing, not just to Ethiopians but to Westerners. Against all odds, there has been a resurrection. ‘It’s all I dreamed of,’ says Mulatu Astatke, ‘for Ethiopia to get recognised. It’s beautiful.’