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Embrace across cultures

Chris Searle on Jazz: Sketches of Ethiopia by Mulatu Astatke

Mulatu Astatke

Sketches of Ethiopia

(Jazz Village 570015)

One of the first direct encounters between jazz and Ethiopia was in 1940, when Duke Ellington's renowned trumpeter Rex Stewart led a band of Ellingtonians including the mighty Duke on piano, in his recording of Menelik.

It was jazz's act of musical solidarity with the Ethiopian people, invaded by 120,000 Mussolini fascists in 1935, and recalled the Ethiopian victory of 1896 when the warrior emperor Menelik led the Ethiopian forces to defeat three invading Italian brigades at the northern town of Adowa.

Now in 2013 we have an album recorded by an orchestra led by the Ethiopian vibraphonist, conga drummer and pianist Mulatu Astatke, comprising Ethiopian and Europe-based musicians cut in studios in Addis Ababa, London and Avignon.

Members of Astatke's band Step Ahead, they include one of Britain's prime free bassists, John Edwards, the stomping young pianist and organist Alex Hawkins, trumpeter Byron Wallen and drummer Tom Skinner who play together in Wallens's London-based band, cellist Danny Keane and tenorist and flautist James Arben.

As for the veteran Astatke, known as the father of "Ethio-jazz," his long-time immersion in multiple musical traditions is a life commitment to integrate the traditional sounds of his homeland into jazz.

Born in 1943 in Jinna, western Ethiopia, as a youth his parents sent him to Wales to study engineering.

He was tempted towards music though and found his way into the Trinity College of Music in London before moving to the US in the early '60s and becoming the first African student at Boston's Berklee College of Music.

He soon became an enthusiast of Latin American jazz and his first two records, Afro-Latin Soul Volumes I-II, were cut in New York City in 1966.

In the early '70s he returned to Ethiopia, introducing "Ethio-jazz" to his people.

In 1973, during Ellington's tour of Ethiopia, Astatke was featured in the Duke's orchestral concerts as guest vibraphonist.

His music was revived in France during the 1990s and appreciation of his transoceanic brilliance grew across both Europe and the US, culminating in being awarded an honorary doctorate at Berklee in 2012.

Sketches of Ethiopia begins with the fierce rhythmic foray of Azmari, with Edwards's bass, well used to African musical genius as a member of South African drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo's band, seething through the percussive undertow.

Gamo gives power to the horn ensemble and lead vocalist Tesfaye, with scope to Jean-Baptiste Saint-Martin's chinking guitar.

A unique piano sound dominates the opening of the traditional Hager Fiker before Astatke's mallets come dancing in above the surging drum-beaten earth.

Gambella begins devoid of the relentless beat, as if it is gradually discovering its own true rhythm, but beneath Tesfaye's words and a unison of horns it finds its own route.

Astatke's vibes take a chorus before Arben's serpentine tenor saxophone brings the flow of African rivers to Assosa Derache, while Wallen's piping trumpet calls out to the sky.

The complex orchestration of Astatke's music is fully evinced in this track as if his Ethiopian encounter with Ellington brought the master's genius to his own very complex heart-sound on his own continent.

The tribal echoes of the Gumuz people radiate into the next track, simply called Gumuz, with Tesfaye's expressive vocal bringing the sounds of the African village into the blood of jazz, in a way reminiscent of many Abdullah Ibrahim South African tunes.

Motherland Abay gives Keane his moment on the album as the track's first section gives his cello its full scope of beauty, there in the mix of Astatke's African soundscape. The fragility of Wallen's London trumpet, its notes so close to breaking point, add a mood of vulnerability creating an amalgam of sounds which only a much-travelled and migratory jazz brain could conceive - a true syncretism of continents.

The finale is Surma, led by Fatoumata Diawara's vocal, blooming from the forest of percussion and horns, and reasserting as Astatke's entire album does that jazz starts and finishes as the music of ensemble and unity, of peoples and cultures mixing and embracing, teaching and learning - the giving and exchanging of civilisations from the large and small centres of the living Earth.

Chris Searle

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