Folk /
Éthiopiques 25: 1971-1975 Modern Roots
*2024 stock* The Swinging Addis of the 1960s and early 1970s (before the dreadful Derg’s Stalinist-military glaciation) was a period of intense experimenting that encompassed the traditional repertoire. Whether Oromo or Amhara, all the greatest voices of the time took part with intense creative fervour, as can be heard on this 25th CD in the Ethiopiques collection. It features such pop singers as Tlahoun Gèssèssè, Alèmayèhu Eshèté, Sèyfou Yohannes, Essatu Tèssèmma etc. as well as traditional art…
Éthiopiques 24: Golden Years Of Modern Ethiopian Music 1969-1975
*2024 stock* As was the case with Ethiopiques 1 and 3, this 24th CD in the Ethiopiques collection presents a selection of powerful pieces from the historical Amha Records catalogue. We meet again with such artists as Ayaléw Mèsfin, Gétatchèw Kassa and Sèyfou Yohannes, and are introduced to other artists as yet unreleased or hardly known in the West, among them Menelik Wèsnatchèw, Seyoum Gèbrèyès, Tamrat Molla and Wubshèt Fisseha. Bonus tracks: Two pieces by the young Mulatu Astatqé, recorded in …
Éthiopiques 23
*2024 stock* The story of Orchestra Ethiopia (1963-1975) is unusual and compelling in more ways than one. Just as modern music was reaching the peak of its excellence and popularity, at the very same moment, via Orchestra Ethiopia's unlikely undertaking, traditional music acquired a legitimacy that the times had tended to deprive it of. Between the coup d'état (Dec 1960) and the revolution (1974), Ethiopia was combining, unbeknownst to all, both the end of an empire and the "golden age" of its m…
Éthiopiques 22: More Vintage! 1972-1974
*2024 stock* Alèmayèhu Eshèté is no less than one of the great voices of the heyday of modern Ethiopian music -- the Swinging Sixties which, in Ethiopia, went on until the fall of the Emperor Haile Sellassie I in 1974. On a par with Tlahoun Gèssèssè, Bzunèsh Bèqèlè or Mahmoud Ahmed, Alèmayèhu is a star at the top of the constellation that once lit up the wild nights in the capital city Addis Ababa. The singer, as remarkable for his frenetic rock numbers as for his heart-rending ballads, has, by …
Éthiopiques 20: Live In Addis
*2024 stock* Russ Gershon and his Grammy-nominated Either/Orchestra have included many Ethiopian pieces into their repertoire in recent years. In January 2004, the Boston big band travelled to Addis for a dream-come-true concert featuring prestigious Ethiopian guests, among them Mulatu Astatqè (Ethiopiques 4, «Broken Flowers») and Gétatchèw Mekurya (Ethiopiques 14). This recording perfectly renders the energy and emotion of this gathering, with beautiful arrangements remarkably performed by exce…
Éthiopiques 19: Alèmyé
*2024 stock* «An authentic legend in Ethiopia, Mahmoud Ahmed has laid down the basis of a music style which is resolutely original in the way it synthesizes the most diverse influences into a language both typical and universal. With his haunting, serpentine voice, at the same time raucous and velvety, Mahmoud Ahmed has invented a world of uncertain borders, an improbable mix of Eastern-African rhythmic lines, mysterious laments with refined ornamentation and melodies of unexpected Indian modula…
Éthiopiques 18: Asguèbba!
*2024 stock* «Asguèbba!» is the Azmari’s cry urging listeners to enter into the dance, an invitation carrying the same sexual innuendo as Latino’s ¡Va dentro! The recordings on this CD are intended as a continuation of those in Tètchawèt! (Ethiopiques 2) and feature most of the artists from the first edition.The songs are accompanied on the mèessenqo (one string fiddle), the krar lyre, the kebero drum and the accordion.
One Evening and Other Folk Songs
Infinite-Sum Game is a curated selection of my solo piano performance in Palermo on May 13th, 2023, at Sala Perriera in the Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa. I have the deepest gratitude first and foremost to Lelio Giannetto and Valeria, as well as Gabri, Luca, Yuki, Angela, Curva Minore, SIO, and the greater Sicilian musical community. It's a great honor to have been embraced by the community in Palermo, to be able to spend so much time there, and to collaborate with so many artists who have become…
Paper Jays
While their name may conjure images of avian origami, rolled cannabis, or cut-up 10th letters, Paper Jays are an instrumental music body from Rhode Island that became fully formed during the session for their forthcoming eponymous release on ESP-disk. Prior, Jesse Cohen and Justin Hubbard’s guitar duo (a trio, only if counting the unmanned feedback drone of a hollow-bodied Gibson) had been contentedly performing and apartment taping for a solid five years. But after witnessing drummer and percus…
Astroturf Noise
Astroturf Noise exists at the intersection of free improvisation, effects-heavy noise music, and American roots music.
Éthiopiques 17: Tlahoun Gèssèssè
*2024 stock* To Ethiopian audiences, Tlahoun Gèssèssè is THE VOICE, even more so than Mahmoud Ahmed, Alèmayèhu Eshèté or Mulatu Astatqé. Endowed with a phenomenal, innate vocal talent, he has been the asbsolute and unequalled icon for an entire country since the fifties, heading up the list of Ethiopian discography. Based around seven ‘modernist’ pieces arranged by the brilliant and innovative Mulatu Astatqé (Ethiopiques 4 : «Ethiojazz»), these first Ethiopiques devoted to Talhoun Gèssèssè also …
Éthiopiques 16: The Lady With The Krar
*2024 stock* Before she became famous as a singer and a player of the krar –the traditional Ethiopian lyre– Asnatqèch Wèrqu was well-known as an actress and a dancer. Inspired by the art of the 'azmaris', the Ethiopian wandering minstrels, she found the voice to transform the vicissitudes of life into poignant laments or sarcastic ditties. Asnatqèch is the last great singer, story-teler and free-thinker to carry on the tradition of "poetic jousting". Needless to say, the CD booklet features the …
Éthiopiques 15: Europe Meets Ethiopia
*2024 stock* The result of a surprising encounter between Ethiopian, French and Dutch musicians, Jump to Addis presents a buoying mix of Abbyssinian tradition, revisited jazz and wild rock'n'roll. The krars (folk lyres) and voices of urban azmaris rub shoulders with the guitars, saxophones and drumsets of European musicians, all in an audacious blend.
Éthiopiques 14: Negus Of Ethiopian Sax
*2024 stock* Probably the most revered veteran of Ethiopian saxophone, Gétatchèw Mèkurya is the 'inventor' of an extremely distinctive musical style. Amongst Ethiopia's numerous vocal genres, there exists a form of singing that is purely warlik: epic and declamatory, harsh and hoarse-voiced, it is known as 'shellela'. This bellicose thunderbolt, quite strictly vocal, was improvised before each attack. Gétatchèw Mèkurya had the brilliant idea of transposing the genre to his saxophone, and here we…
Éthiopiques 13: Ethiopian Groove - The Golden Seventies
*2024 stock* An augmented, improved and remastered edition of the legendary anthology of Ethiopian groove that was issued in the 1990s. This selection is a tribute to the haydays of Ethiopian music and reproduces the final salvos of the musical fireworks before they were brutally extinguished by the dictatorship. 1969-78: this near-decade was undoubtedly the golden age of modern Ethiopian music, with its swinging, thunderous or simply gigantic brasses and historic singers adapting and rearrangin…
Éthiopiques 12: Konso Music And Songs - Kirba Afaa Xonso
*2024 stock* The Ethiopiques series aims to make Westerners discover the missing link in African music. The great Italian musicologist Enrico Castelli has devoted this recording to the Konso, an ethnic group living at the border with Sudan. This panorama of Konso music presents pieces linked to daily agricultural tasks, sacred and ritual songs, as well as recreational songs. The rich instrumentarium includes "hibhara", "maayra" and "luutota" flutes, "kihayta" lyre to accompany songs, "tawna" be…
Éthiopiques 11: The Harp Of King David
*2024 stock* Although commonly know as "King David's harp", the bèguèna is not actually a member of the harp family. It is in fact an oversized lyre with ten strings –usually plucked, sometimes strummed with a plectrum. It is probably the oldest musical instrument played in Ethiopia. One of today's uncontested masters of the bèguèna, Alèmu Aga, sings religious songs, traditional fables and folk tales, as well as his own poems. Meditative, devotional or uplifting sor some, simply "mind blowing" f…
Éthiopiques 10: Tezeta - Ethiopian Blues & Ballads
*2024 stock* Emptiness, melancholy, nostalgia; doom and gloom, morbid musings; heartache or homesickness: such is the stock in trade of the misery and mournful memories expressed by the song Tezeta - Ethiopia's majestic hymn to the blues. Etymologically, the word itself means memory, nostalgia, and several Ethiopian authors have used Tezeta as the title for their memoirs. For Ethiopians, it is the Tezeta genre that seems to capture the essence of the blues.
Giorgos Katsaros
Big Tip! Our obsession with underground Greek music continues with 10 ultra-rare recordings of heartbreak and vice from rembetiko legend Giorgos Katsaros. Katsaros, who by some accounts lived to be over 100 years old, carried the old songs of Greece to the Diaspora in the United States, bridging centuries of music in one storied lifetime. Born in 1901 on the Greek island of Amorgos, Katsaros’ was enchanted with the songs he picked up as a kid in the streets of Piraeus and Athens. Encouraged by h…
Éthiopiques 9 (1969-1974)
*2024 stock* The Alèmayèhu songs already presented in Ethiopiques 3 and 8 have given a foretaste of this outstanding stylist of Ethiopian pop, a singer as remarkable for his frenetic rock numbers as for his heartrending ballads. By dint of rampant Americanism, he earned himsef such nicknames as The Ethiopian James Brown or the Abyssinian Elvis. With his dazzling stage presence, nimble voicebox and wicked pompadour, he is a strutting show-off, straight out of American Graffiti or Saturday Night F…