#ethiopian music

[mywifeleftme]

357: Hailu Mergia & Dahlak Band // Wede Harer Guzo

Wede Harer Guzo Hailu Mergia & Dahlak Band 1970s, Ms Recording (Bandcamp)

I can’t 100% recall, but I’m pretty sure this was the first African record I ever bought (it was this or Nass El Ghiwane), and I wasn’t the only one—I’ve got a few friends with exactly one African record in their collection, and it’s this. When his music was rediscovered in 2016 after Awesome Tapes From Africa pressed this record (using Mergia’s own cassette copy as a source), Wede Harer Guzo became for western music nerds a part of that small company of gateway albums to the music of an entire continent. Let’s play a game of Remember Some Guys.

Remember Some Guys: That One African Record Edition

Expensive Shit Who is William Onyeabor? Wede Harer Guzo Nigeria 70 (The Definitive Story of 1970’s Funky Lagos) A dollar bin Miriam Makeba LP uh TEN$ION Remain in Light (honorary)

God I’m tired. Anyway, I’ve always had kind of an uncertain relationship with this record. Mergia’s organ can sound like a cool balm on my aching brain or… elevator music. Dahlak Band can sound like a perfect fusion of the floaty “intellectual highlife” of Celestine Ukwu and the grooves of Booker T. and the MG’s… or, what were we talking about? An entire side just past me by unnoticed, yet again. I think this has more to do with me than it does with the record… though at a cassette-length hour-plus run time, some ideas do get repeated.

(Three ellipses in one paragraph… I think that’s more than I’ve used in this whole series so far. I’m so tired of writing these things man. I’m not even really divorced, I can’t wait to leave.)

Anyway, again, at its best, the record is transcendently beautiful. The way Mergia’s organ expands and contracts like the shimmer of light on dark water on “Anchin Kfu Ayinkash,” guitarist Dawit Kassa answering his pauses with little soulful licks… there the ellipses go again. Sometimes the record feels like it’s insinuating I should go to the lobby for more popcorn. Maybe I’ll buy Raisinettes?

It’s very good I’m saying, obviously. See you tomorrow.

357/365

[orbinnshirt]

currently listening to this amazing album! :D make sure to check it out

[soundgrammar]

Alèmayehu Eshété: Telantena zare

[kalopyrgos1]

Tezeta (Tizita) - Longing, memory

[burlveneer-music]

dragonchild - s/t LP - Debo Band’s DA Mekonnen in saxophone explorations and meditations

In 2016, Boston-based Ethiopian group Debo Band released Ere Gobez, their second and, for now, final LP. The band played a handful of festival dates over the next few years, gradually trailing off into silence. DA Mekonnen, founding member and bandleader, has spent the years since then slowing down. He questioned nearly every foundational element in his life. He got sober, dove deep into film photography, ecology, and astrology, and focused on feeling the deep and difficult feelings contemporary reality gives us so many ways to escape. He also built a solitary music practice from scratch, which he refers to as an “ancestral practice” - a connection to a spirit of independence he traces back through his family. The idea of an ancestral practice is also a nod to his grandmothers, who were each spirit workers involved in zār, a kind of ritual to purge spirit possession with roots in Ethiopia. Mekonnen’s goal in the reset was to “make things with the kind of love you can’t ever take back,” to quote from Jarod K. Anderson, a poet and writer who goes by The Cryptonaturalist and whose work is one of many inspirations behind Mekonnen’s new project, dragonchild.

dragonchild takes the exploration of Ethiopian music Mekonnen began with Debo Band and explodes it into vivid, three-dimensional space. Where Debo called back to the sounds of 1970s Addis and added original material along those same lines, dragonchild shatters traditions and boundaries, incorporating sampled material, field recordings, experiments in high and low fidelity, and the throughline that unites the diverse sounds, layers of Mekonnen’s rich and ecstatic saxophone. “I’ve been thinking a lot about ego death and being willing to let certain things go,” he says. “Things that made you feel good about yourself, made you feel really successful. I think artistically those things can be really dangerous. They can be dangerous crutches.” In moving beyond what brought him success in a fickle industry, he is braving new territory to bring us something more, something vulnerable and alive. The name of the project derives from Haile Gerima’s 2008 film Teza, the story of an Ethiopian lab researcher who returns to his small village after long sojourns in both Germany and Addis Ababa. Near the end of the film, there is the hopeful but enigmatic line “do not despair - we are children of the dragon,” which evokes the resilience of the people and of the earth. It’s a nod to Erta Ale, the active lava lake in Ethiopia photographed by Michael Tsegaye for his Afar series, included as part of the album artwork and recognized instinctively by Mekonnen as “portraits of the dragon.”

[willknightauthor]

I love internet music rabbit holes. Found this via the channel for an obscure publisher that I found via an obscure video of traditional Persian music. This guy completely merges traditional East African musical styles and rock-and-roll here, and it works really well. It's weird how it's been up for 3 years and still has less than 3k views.

[javihsuarez]

Fanzine about a travel in Ethiopia. In this travel we made an article about the musical scene in Addis Ababa during the 70´s and 80´s mostly recorded in casetes. We enterviewed and old school musician Dawit Yifru, a new generation one Ethiopian records, Tsige Belachew a producer and ownder of the shop Master Sound today reconverted in Bikeshop and the casete collector Adam Wole.

[automatic4theppl]

Really really really good album

[shaxaapost]

Watch "Top 10 Shafisoo Aqiil | New Best Oromo Music Nonstop Oromo Music" on YouTube

Watch “Top 10 Shafisoo Aqiil | New Best Oromo Music Nonstop Oromo Music” on YouTube

Top 10 #Shafisoo #Aqiil | New Best Oromo Music  #Nonstop Oromo Music Shafisoo Aqiil  is the best Oromo musician. Best loved tobe listened by lover in Hararghe area. Oromo music nonstop. Best Oromo music video. this is Shafisoo Aqil’s video song with the most with Shafiso Aqil’s songs which are top-10 songs in the video for you to enjoy and listen to for free. Ethiopia music, #oromo #music,…

[mywifeleftme]

228: Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou // Jerusalem

Jerusalem Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou 2023, Mississippi Records (Bandcamp)

When she passed away at age 99 in Jerusalem in March of 2023, the Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou (alternatively spelled Tsege-Mariam Gebru) had achieved a degree of international fame for a number of piano recordings she had made in the 1960s and ‘70s after they were collected on a 2006 volume of the long-running Ethiopiques series. Much of the attention paid to her story has focused on the circumstances of her extraordinary life, which reached from the court of the Emperor Haile Selassi, to wartime refugee status after Mussolini’s 1936 invasion of her home, to an administrative denial of an opportunity to study at London’s Royal Academy of Music, to taking her vows at nunnery. There are richer synopses already written than I can manage here of both her life and the technical qualities of her remarkable compositions, which utilize a uniquely Ethiopian musical vocabulary but will likely remind Western listeners of Satie or Beethoven.

Mississippi Records has undertaken a project to reissue her slim body of work (she is known to have composed around 150 songs, though the number she recorded seems to be more like 50), though their compilations tend to hop around chronologically rather than re-releasing complete records. Jerusalem is the latest of these as of this writing and the first to be released since Emahoy’s death, collecting tracks from a 1972 10”, home recordings made in the 1980s, and a single song that appears to date from 1963 (the liner notes are somewhat unclear on this). Like Emahoy’s other releases, these are all solo piano tracks, instrumental save for that 1963 outlier, the tender “Quand la mer furieuse,” which is the first vocal track in her oeuvre. The highlight to my ear is 1972’s “Jerusalem,” a vivid longer piece the artist says is meant to evoke both the love of Ethiopians for that ancient city, and the tragedies of the wars which have ravaged it. Indeed, there is a pensiveness to the song, a sense of an endless cycle in its refrain that nonetheless cycles off into a different motif each time it recurs—signs of hope, perhaps, that despite the recurrences of history, the city’s soil may produce alternative flowers.

227/365

[micamicster]

Every time I reach the point where i loathe the entire internet and I wish it would explode I stumble across something fantastic and I’m like oh maybe the tool for infinite human communication and information exchange is neither exclusively good nor evil but encompasses both 🤔

[kemetic-dreams]

Blues has evolved from the unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves imported from West Africa and rural Africans into a wide variety of styles and subgenres, with regional variations across the United States. Although blues (as it is now known) can be seen as a musical style based on both European harmonic structure and the African call-and-response tradition that transformed into an interplay of voice and guitar, the blues form itself bears no resemblance to the melodic styles of the West African griots. Additionally, there are theories that the four-beats-per-measure structure of the blues might have its origins in the Native American tradition of pow wow drumming. Some scholars identify strong influences on the blues from the melodic structures of certain West African musical styles of the savanna and sahel. Lucy Durran finds similarities with the melodies of the Bambara people, and to a lesser degree, the Soninke people and Wolof people, but not as much of the Mandinka people. Gerard Kubik finds similarities to the melodic styles of both the west African savanna and central Africa, both of which were sources of enslaved people.

No specific African musical form can be identified as the single direct ancestor of the blues. However the call-and-response format can be traced back to the music of Africa. That blue notes predate their use in blues and have an African origin is attested to by "A Negro Love Song", by the English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, from his African Suite for Piano, written in 1898, which contains blue third and seventh notes.

The Diddley bow (a homemade one-stringed instrument found in parts of the American South sometimes referred to as a jitterbug or a one-string in the early twentieth century) and the banjo are African-derived instruments that may have helped in the transfer of African performance techniques into the early blues instrumental vocabulary. The banjo seems to be directly imported from West African music. It is similar to the musical instrument that griots and other Africans such as the Igbo played (called halam or akonting by African peoples such as the Wolof, Fula and Mandinka). However, in the 1920s, when country blues began to be recorded, the use of the banjo in blues music was quite marginal and limited to individuals such as Papa Charlie Jackson and later Gus Cannon.

Blues music also adopted elements from the "Ethiopian airs", minstrel shows and Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment. The style also was closely related to ragtime, which developed at about the same time, though the blues better preserved "the original melodic patterns of African music"

[hasellia]

Eyy, so @raptorbricks tagged me for this like a week ago and I'm finally got around to it! Like what Raptorbricks did I added links to the youtube sources of the soungs, plus I added some links to translations for some of the songs.

“Rules: shuffle your ‘on repeat’ playlist and post the first ten tracks, then tag ten people.”

10 songs from my “on repeat” mix on shuffle:

The Bug Collector - Haley Henderickx

Musicawi silt | Getatchew Mekuria & The Ex (You don't need lyrics, just listen to the guitar and saxophone).

The Wisp Sings - Winter Aid

ingerlaliinnaleqaagut - Nanook (Translated Lyrics)

つきをみた (tsukiwomita) - Sohta (想太) | (YT link to an ENG fansub) | (Niconico link here)

Weather - Luck Luster

Kereshmeh; Reng-e Shalakhu (Persia: Ancient era) - Kazem Davoudian and Geoff Knorr | (WARNING PARADOX GAMES OST) (Link to the original Karamesh) (Link to original Reng-‌e Shalakhu)

ᐃᒥᖅᑕᖅ (Imiqtaq) - Riit | (Translated lyrics)

Dhaliwuy Bay - Yirrmal

Moon is Sharp - Grouper

... I swear I listen to more than just non-english songs and milennial Tiktok music, the algorithm just wanted to expose me.

I might reblog this later to give a quick summery of the context of each song and some of my reccomended videos for getting into non-western music.

Now for the Ten I choose to expose their music taste are...

@grapeagata @broccoli-bitching @crocadilly @enchanteddaydreams @ofals @sock-puppet-dinosaur @tootheyes @justgoji @theolminitiative and @ratbonesart.

No actual obligation to join if you don't want to. However, anyone is free to join in if they want, just make sure to tag me!

[urbxntwilight]

tagged by @draftzero for ten songs ive been listening to lately!! here goes

I Give Up by Caroline Polachek

Concrete Angel by Hannah Diamond

vietato calpestare i prati by default genders

My Kind of Woman by Mac DeMarco

Sapokanikan by Joanna Newsom

No Ordinary Love by Sade

Angel On My Shoulder by Sega Bodega

Al Daw by Maya al Khaldi

Ebakesh tareqign by Mahmoud Ahmed

Coxcomb Red by Songs: Ohia

hmm i tag @beeben @nyxeze @mom-friendtm @a-dream-seeking-light hehe

[soulmusicsongs]

Ethiopian Grooves, part 2

Ethiopian Grooves in 10 tracks: Ethiopian Funk, Soul and Jazz. An unique fusion of ancient Ethiopian music with Afro-funk, jazz, soul, and Latin rhythms. Enjoy!

Atrakegne - Bizunesh Bekele (Atrakegne / Eneramed, 1977)

Belew Bedubaye - Menelik Wossenatchew (Belew Bedubaye / Tezeta, 1971)

Birtukane - Hailu Mergia And The Walias (Tche Belew, 1977)

Ebo Lala - Mulatu Astatke (New York - Addis - London - The Story Of Ethio Jazz 1965-1975, 2009)

Enken Yelelebish - Girma Beyene (Enken Yelelebish / Ene Negne By Manesh, 1969).

Hametegnaw - Seyoum Gebreyes (Hametegnaw / Yehagere Gegna, 1973)

Kenoru Lebitcha - Alemayehu Eshete (Tikur Gissila / Kenoru Lebitcha, 1972)

Musika Musika - Syoum Gebreyess (Mech Ene Terf Felghu / Musika Musika, 1973)

Tezeta - Menelik Wossenatchew (Belew Bedubaye / Tezeta, 1971)

Tizita - Getatchew Mekuria (Getatchew Mekuria And His Saxophone, 1972)

More Soul Music

Ethiopian Grooves

Soul from South Africa: 18 tracks

African Funk from the Seventies

Funk from Africa in 20 tracks