CHIMES OF FREEDOM
Mulatu Astatke’s music — he is acknowledged as the father of Ethio-jazz — has survived repression and is now celebrated by leading artists, writes
At 5:15 on Saturday afternoon one of the coolest, most talented, yet criminally undersung African musicians, Mulatu Astatke, 74, will with his band Steps Ahead blow an audience’s mind at the 19th annual Cape Town International Jazz Festival.
Mulatu is the father of Ethio-jazz, an exquisite funky, soul-tinged jazz with Latin and Afro rhythms which he melded and moulded over four decades into something beguiling, creating something that sounds unlike any other style of music. I’ve seen it aptly described as “a laid-back East African cousin of John Coltrane’s jazz or James Brown’s funk”.
On the phone from London recently he gave me a brief lesson on Ethio-jazz: it combines traditional Ethiopian pentatonic five tones with the 12 from American jazz, “but I’ll explain more to you when I get to Cape Town”, he tells me.
Mulatu plays keyboards, the vibraphone and percussion. He learnt to play in the ’60s when the young Ethiopian enrolled at the jazz-orientated Berklee College in Boston to become its first African student.
His first two albums sounded like many of the other Latin jazz records released in 1966. Back in his motherland in 1969, Mulatu released the single Yekermo Sew (a man of experience and wisdom). It was the first Ethio-jazz — it was, incidentally, included on the soundtrack of Jim Jarmusch’s 2005 film Broken Flowers and still sounds as vital as when it was released.
By 1973 Mulatu’s reputation had grown so much that he was recruited to play with jazz giant Duke Ellington when he toured Ethiopia and Zambia.
The next year Haile Selassie was deposed in a military coup by the Derg, a Soviet-backed hardline junta chaired by Mengistu Haile Mariam.
Eventually all Ethiopian creativity, including in music, would be smothered during the 18-year rule of the repressive regime.
During this period Mulatu recorded an album with Alice Coltrane, John’s second wife, when she visited Ethiopia.
But sadly, the tapes were lost under the destructive Derg regime.
By the 1990s, after the fall of Mengistu in 1991, a new interest in the incredibly funky music from the Horn of Africa eventually led to the highly regarded and still ongoing series Ethiopiques. Volume four was dedicated to Mulatu.
Ever since, Mulatu has been sampled by hip-hop artists like Kanye West, Nas,
Madlib, Cut Chemist and Damian Marley. “It’s great! The more sampling that happens, the more popular Ethio-jazz becomes,” he tells me.
He has also continued collaborating, touring and recording, including the feted Mulatu Steps Ahead in 2010 and
Sketches of Ethiopia (2013)
albums.
A very young 74, Mulatu is going on an intensive European tour after the Cape Town Jazz Festival.
He’s also working in London on an Ethiopian opera dedicated to the Coptic Church.
“It is a very interesting story: Ethiopia has contributed so much to the science and music and everything. This one is about the Coptic Church and its contribution to the science of music.”
Then, in between, Mulatu finds time to run the African Jazz Village club in Addis Ababa, plus regular visits to Harvard and MIT where he works on creating a new version of traditional Ethiopian instruments, according to a recent Guardian article.
So how do you do what will clearly leave musicians a third of your age exhausted?
“This is music. You just keep on going, my friend.”
This will be Mulatu’s first show in Cape Town. “I’ve played twice in Johannesburg. The audience was so beautiful, I just had to play more and more and more.
“We’ll play most of my compositions — Ethio-jazz,” he says about the upcoming show in South Africa.
I can hear the London traffic in the background as he hurries me on — “I’m on my way to another meeting. I promise we’ll talk more in Cape Town.”
The Cape Town International Jazz Festival takes place on March 23 & 24 at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC).
I’ve played twice in Johannesburg. The audience was so beautiful