Ethio-jazz: from Swinging Addis to the global revival

Recorded in New York for the tiny Worthy label in 1972, this is where ethio-jazz stops being an experiment and turns into a style. Astatke had studied vibraphone and percussion at Berklee, then went hunting for a way to play Ethiopian melodies over a hard-bop rhythm section and Latin congas. The music moves like a slow procession, all minor-key haze and tuned percussion. If you hear one record from this whole list, make it this one.

Cut in Addis in 1974 for Amha Eshèté's pioneering label, this is the home-turf companion to the New York sessions. Where Mulatu of Ethiopia has a cool downtown sheen, the Addis recordings feel hotter and closer, the horns blurry, the organ pushed up front. It names the genre and then proves it in twelve tracks.

Mahmoud Ahmed sang for the Imperial Bodyguard Band before going solo, and his voice has a quaver that lands somewhere between a call to prayer and a soul shout. He recorded Erè Mèla Mèla in 1975, and it barely travelled until Belgium's Crammed Discs reissued it in 1986, at which point Western listeners discovered an entire pop culture they had never heard. This is the record that lit the fuse on the whole rediscovery.

They called Alèmayèhu Eshèté the Ethiopian Elvis, pompadour included, and the nickname undersells him. Over James Brown horn charts and greasy organ vamps cut in late-60s Addis, he sings hard Amharic soul that still sounds combustible fifty years on. This ninth Éthiopiques volume gathers his fiercest singles from the years just before the curfews shut the clubs for good.

If Alèmayèhu was the showman, Tlahoun Gèssèssè was the singer the whole country agreed on. He fronted the Imperial Bodyguard and Police orchestras and became the defining male voice of the golden age, equally at home with a tearjerker and a stomper. Volume 17 collects the lush, brass-heavy sides that made him a national figure before the revolution broke the scene apart.

Getatchew Mekurya took the shellela, a wordless Ethiopian war chant, and blew it through a tenor saxophone, arriving at a free-honking sound he had worked out by the early 1960s without ever hearing Albert Ayler. The punks eventually caught up: the Dutch anarcho group The Ex toured and recorded with him on 2006's Moa Anbessa. This collection is the proof that he invented his version of free jazz on his own terms, years earlier.

Strut's Inspiration Information series pairs a veteran with a younger band, and the third installment put Astatke in a London studio with the psych-funk crew The Heliocentrics in 2009. It comes out heavier and dustier than his 70s work, the vibraphone drifting over fat breakbeats. This is the album that handed ethio-jazz to crate-diggers who came up on Madlib instead of Coltrane.

Hailu Mergia led the Walias Band, the house group at the Addis Hilton, then emigrated and ended up driving a cab in Washington DC, keeping a keyboard in the trunk to practise between fares. He made this solo cassette of accordion and Rhodes by himself in 1985, and it sat forgotten until Awesome Tapes From Africa reissued it in 2013. One man, a drum machine, and a head full of melodies he refused to let die. Nothing else sounds quite like it.

The reissue gave Mergia a second career, and Lala Belu is the sound of a man in his seventies playing like he is late for something. Backed by a sharp trio, he stretches old Ethiopian themes into organ-trio workouts that swing harder than anything he managed the first time around. The clearest evidence that the revival was about more than nostalgia.

Geneva is a long way from Addis, yet this Swiss group plays the golden-age book with grit rather than museum manners. Mercato (2011) runs Mahmoud Ahmed and Girma Bèyènè tunes through dub effects and post-rock dynamics, loud and a little unhinged. It is the kind of record that sends you back to the originals and then forward into whatever it is up to.

This Paris quintet named themselves after a Mulatu tune and spent the 2010s as Europe's most dependable ethio-funk band. Sost, which means three in Amharic, is their third album, all springy horn lines and rubber-band grooves. They later backed the returning golden-age singers on tour, which tells you how seriously the source musicians rated them.

Girma Bèyènè wrote and arranged some of the most sophisticated songs of the golden age, then stopped performing for nearly forty years after the revolution. Akalé Wubé coaxed him back into a studio for this 2017 album, numbered Éthiopiques 30, the first newly recorded entry in that storied reissue series. A lost master singing again, with a band young enough to be his grandkids and good enough to keep pace.

Not jazz exactly, but you need it for context. This London-based trio strips Ethiopian music back to the krar (a six-string lyre), a drum kit and one big voice, and people leave their shows swearing they just saw a rock band. Ethiopia Super Krar (2012) is loud and hypnotically repetitive, a reminder that the pentatonic modes under all of this come from a deep folk tradition that predates the horns.

End where it started, with the man himself, still curious. Sketches of Ethiopia (2013) finds Astatke in his late sixties leading an international band, folding in West African kora and a guest vocal without thinning out the pentatonic core. Forty years after inventing the style, he was still its most restless practitioner.