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“Do you know the Metro club?” I show myself the recognition of the 82-year-old father of Ethio-jazz, Mulatu Astatke, who knows better than me what the UK capital has lost (the Soho venue was closed many years ago). At that time, he was focused on the jazz scene of the 60s, being friends with Ronnie Scott and the saxophonist Joe Harriott, who sometimes lived in the clubs of Soho, as well as musicians from Africa and the Caribbean.
But when he returned to “Swinging Addis” a few years later with a new version he created in England and the United States, the audience at one of his first concerts was not very impressed with his combination of jazz and harp-like music. my hope. “Stop,” said Astatke. “Just!” He didn’t say anything. Instead, he bowed, thanked and left. “I said: ‘I’ll show you,'” Astatke recalls in his smoky voice. “‘One day I will come back to show you.’
According to his words, audiences around the world have fallen under his otherworldly music. We meet a few days after Astatke performed at London’s Royal Festival Hall in June, which is expected to be his last UK performance. Like many of his songs, it’s hard to put first. Dressed in all black, they huddle together on an armchair in the empty lounge of a London art gallery. It was beautiful to see an audience full of Ethiopian jazz, he tells me.
But it was not easy to try something new. The jazz music he has produced in more than a dozen albums is mesmeric, setting the unique scales of traditional Ethiopian music with western jazz and funk, as well as Afro-Latin music. They weave traditional materials – the cage, let’s go and kebyes – and religious music from the fourth century. “Ethio-jazz is a beautiful science,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “You can hear jazz, you can hear 12 notes, you can hear 5 notes and everything combined.”
Long before the Ethiopian giant could improve his voice, he was sent by his parents to a in Wrexham, North Wales, at the age of 16, he began studying aeronautical engineering. It was there that he picked up a trumpet and was encouraged to start a career in music. Subsequent music at Trinity College of Music in London and Berklee College of Music in Boston, as the first African student, followed.
At the end of the 60s, Astatke shut between New York – where his group, the Ethiopian Quintet, recorded Afro-Latin Soul 1 & 2 – and Addis Ababa, where he began recording music for Amha Records, the first independent label, in 1969. “Then as soon as I made Ethio-jazz, I was alone.”
His Ethio-jazz comes from the musical culture of a country that, unlike many of its neighbors, has been independent for the past 2,000 years (with the brief exception of Italy from 1936 to 1941). Astatke had returned to Addis with his vibraphone and electric keyboard, to the good times of the night and music under the rule of Emperor Haile Selassie (think saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya, singer Mahmoud Ahmed and Hailu Mergia of the keyboardist, to name a few), which was a fertile ground for experimentation.
With his reputation growing, in 1973 Astatke performed in Addis with Duke Ellington, who was visiting Ethiopia and Zambia on a government-sponsored tour. “They didn’t expect this from an African”, the US jazz legend told Astatke, while the saxophone section played Ethio-jazz. “He loved it,” he recalls today, bitterly. It was so good, so beautiful.
The era of popular wildlife under Selassie came to an end when the king was deposed by a Marxist government in 1974, and a period of repression followed for nearly two decades in which hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians were killed, imprisoned or deported.
My questions about Astatke’s behavior towards Selassie and life under the Ethiopian communist regime, however, met with difficulty. “I don’t participate in the military, I don’t get involved in politics, I don’t get involved with anyone. I live in peace. This is how I survive,” he says firmly. Why are people not interested in politics? “I don’t like it. You don’t respect politicians. I love my country, I love my culture, I love the people. That’s all. Nothing more.”
Astatke wants to ensure that Ethiopian cultures are not recognized. Talk to the singer long enough and any conversation will focus on the “wild people” of the country, who feel that they still don’t get credit for their musical contributions. For example, consider the few scales used by American saxophonist Charlie Parker (think leaps or half steps); The Derashe tribe in southern Ethiopia, it is said, plays a similar scale. “Who’s first? Charlie Parker or this tribe?” He says. “We don’t respect these people.”
When he writes some examples that speak to the African influence that has been forgotten in western music, it sounds like I have stumbled on a game show. What came first, is let’s go or cello? The energizing cha-cha and king music he heard on a trip to Cuba when he met Fidel Castro, or similar songs found in the music of Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania?
Astatke jumped to Japan, a country whose traditional music uses a five-note scale like Ethiopia. (“Who was the first? Who created it? Where did this come from?”) He then compares Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, who famously had different compositions, to St Yared, a 5th-century Aksumite composer who is credited with creating his own compositions (“How much credit do you give him?”). Astatke recalls being invited to give a lecture at a university in Ethiopia, where the students could not name the mountain behind the classroom but knew German and Russian musicians. “We don’t do research, we go to Europe a lot instead of doing research on African people,” he says. “I feel sorry for education in the world, culture.”
In the 1990s, Astatke visited various Ethiopian villages – Derashe in the south and Gambella, home of the Nilotic Anuak people – where he was immediately welcomed. There they talked for a long time and sometimes they stayed in small houses. The great respect he has for them is clear: “The people of the bush created Mulatu, because I became a musician by listening to music.” let’s go.”
His manager, sitting at the table with us, pulls out his laptop and sings a beautiful song by Astatke and members of the Derashe tribe, one of several communities he brought to the studio in the 1990s. The second movie, from the 1970s, he is shown performing with traditional musicians performing music cage. He said: “I became a musician by listening to these people, they created me.”
Astatke will soon return to Addis Ababa where he is awaiting an African audience Jazz The village he opened in 2013, which is now managed by his son. The venue still attracts international visitors and showcases local musicians today.
What’s next? He toyed with the idea of playing new music at a club in Addis. His latest album, Mulatu Plays Mulatu, was his new album the top songs are his UK group, but the next one will have musicians from the “wild” and those based in Addis. But there is no name for the project, he insists – it is still a work in progress.
“Elevating Ethiopia, promoting our culture to the world, that’s what makes me great and happy,” he says. “It took me years and years, but we finally made it.” Only then, I see a smile beneath Astatke’s great demeanor. “Give respect to Africa,” he says, “and the wild people.”
Mulatu’s album Astatke Mulatu Plays Mulatu is out now on Strut Records.
