Ethiopia music reviews

This dashing and intelligent tribute to Walt Whitman's poetry as art song puts commitment to artistry at center stage. With uncommon sensitivity and magnificent voice, Thomas Hampson lovingly interprets 22 songs by various composers, successfully capturing the emotional range of the American bard's verse by delicately caressing the poetry and, alternately, igniting its every nuance. These song settings enhance the innate music in Whitman's poems, giving them passionate expression in another dimension. Craig Rutenberg's stellar accompaniment is a lesson in effective collaboration. Hampson's interspersing of four poetry readings is below this recording's interpretive caliber, but it's a nice touch. Non-Whitman-heads may find the entire recording a bore, though. - -Barbara Eisner Bayer

The introductory album to what is an ongoing series on the music of Ethiopia from the '60s and '70s features a variety of vocal and instrumental tracks from artists mostly unfamiliar to Western audiences. This brief period of liberated creativity before a military shutdown yielded an astonishing burst of creativity, melding the traditions of Ethiopia (geographically and culturally straddling Africa and the Middle East) with R&B and European pop in unexpected ways. Loping rhythms merge with Memphis-style horns, wheezy Farfisa organs, and quavering but passionate vocals that at times shimmer with brilliance. Early tracks by superstar Mahmoud Ahmed merge with rarities like the stunning Teshome Meteku, whose career spanned only four tracks total. Ending with the biggest ever hit, Getatchew Kassa's "Tezeta" (5,000 copies sold), this will leave you wanting more, as will the wonderful and comprehensive liner notes. --Derek Rath

With ties--most of them clearly nonbinding--to the sanctioned musical institutions of Ethiopia in the 1960s (police bands and the like), the singers and players on the Ethiopiques series of reissues were in a funky bind. They had pledged some allegiance to Emperor Haile Selassie I and his imperial declarations, but their muses picked up distant signals from North America, including jazz's horn charts, funk's on-the-one rhythms, and an overriding sense of urgency in music made by youth. Here's volume 8 of the Ethiopiques series, testimony in 70-plus minutes to the winning power of the youth culture's music. With the series' most unabashed nod to James Brown in Alèmayèhu Eshèté's six tracks, volume 8 goes further than its predecessors in documenting a jazzy, soulful, electric-keyboard-fueled scene that simply ignores conventional musical borders. Eshèté's vocals bark and then soar over the webbed rhythms with all the force of Brown's--and an additionally rich range of guitars and keyboards that race around and through each other like polyrhythmic drums. What volume 8 shows is that the impact of soul, jazz, and funk (try Lèmma Dèmissew on for size) provided so much quiltwork to be syncopated together in these hip, danceable tunes. Listening to Samuel Bèlay's band kick the horns over an artfully hanging-back rhythmic tide, it's hard to imagine that a musical culture this rich could be stymied by the late 1970s--just a few years after Selassie's regime was crushed. --Andrew Bartlett

Largely the work of formidable musician-arranger Mulatu Astatqe, the 14 instrumentals here were originally issued on two LPs in 1972 and 1974 in Ethiopia, and represent a curious blend of soul-jazz and R&B with just a smattering of Ethiopian roots breaking up the stabbing horn lines, wah-wah guitars, and simmering electric piano. Curious, because at the time jazz was not very popular in Ethiopia, but that is no reflection on the quality of these primitively recorded sides of idiosyncratic Afro-funk. The grooves are long and laconic, the sound reminiscent of Miles Davis's "In a Silent Way" paired with Cannonball Adderly and Roy Ayers. But, as with all things Ethiopian, the music retains its own unique and unmistakable identity, one somewhere between a late-night jazz hole-in-the-wall group and a supper club belly-dancing combo. There are some very inventive arrangements and vigorous soloing, rendering a highly articulate and listenable music that was, at the time, doomed to go nowhere. Such is the retrospective value of reissues. --Derek Rath