When Falceto first went to Ethiopia, in , it was the year of famine and starvation. The country was governed by the Derg, a communist military junta that ruled from to , which had imposed a curfew when took it power after Haile Selassie was ousted. Some musicians, such as Astatke, were drafted by the Derg in the s to write stirring socialist-realist tunes celebrating the achievements of the revolution.
Live Aid was, asserts Falceto, bad for the music of Ethiopia. It's a mountainous country that is quite green - the problems in were more to do with geopolitical struggles in the Cold War than anything else. And Addis is a very sophisticated city, with plenty of rich people as well as poor. Apart from its distinctive and rather oriental five-note scales, Falceto suggests that what makes Ethiopia so unique musically is the fact that "unlike any other African country, it has been independent for 3, years, apart from the six years the Italians were colonists.
Mahmoud Ahmed was a member of the Imperial Bodyguard Band for years. I meet Falceto in Toulouse, because he has finally found what he thinks is a world-class Ethiopian-style band in Les Tigres des Platanes, a French jazz group who he is recording alongside the Ethiopian chanteuse Etenesh Wassie.
Something to celebrate along with the Ethiopian millennium this September - as the country uses the Coptic as opposed to the Gregorian calendar, it is still there. I don't entirely agree with the title of this compilation. It's an entirely subjective thing. This is a good thing, serving to illustrate the wealth of outstanding music that series editor Francis Falceto has uncovered over the past 10 years.
And at any rate, it's hard to argue with the subtitle, as these discs are indeed filled with hypnotic grooves that offer a nice beginner's guide to a series that's earned every scrap of its legendary status. Americans and some Europeans could be forgiven for harboring skepticism about a series focused on reissuing Ethiopian popular music-- two decades later, images of the East African nation's s famine is the first, if not the only, reference point many of us have of the country.
It's hard to overstate how tiny a piece of the Ethiopian puzzle those images are. This is a country with a continuous history stretching back two millennia, a nation that converted to Christianity in the 4th century, and the only African nation never to be colonized by Europeans, though it did endure a brief occupation by Fascist Italy in the late s and early 40s.
It's also home to the oldest human remains ever found. Because of its highland geography and buffer zones of desert, Ethiopian culture developed more or less separately from surrounding cultures, with distinctive music to match. All these elements mixed so seamlessly with American rock and soul in the hands of the country's best musicians created a new style of music. Most of the musicians who played on the scene that came to be known as "Swinging Addis" got their starts playing in official bands of Haile Selassie, the last Emperor of Ethiopia-- the Body Guard Band, Police Band, Army Band and official theater bands churned out musicians who were deftly skilled on Western instruments and highly disciplined.
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