Carry on cabby
Rediscovered Ethiopian keyboard hero takes a bow. Or four. Taxi for David Hutcheon…
Hailu Mergia La Petite Halle, Paris
The lights are on and the crowd, with the exception of the stragglers wanting selfies or signed albums, has dispersed, when Hailu Mergia shuffles nervously back onto the stage for what – it got a little confusing as the demands for more intensified – may be his fourth encore. His trio’s drummer sits behind his kit, unsure what to expect. Instead, the recently rediscovered and slightly overawed keyboard hero offers a tentative Yefkir Engurguro, the closing piece on Lala Belu, his first new album in more than 30 years. “Thank you very much,” he whispers to the 20 or so packed tightly around his Rhodes. “I’ve never played that in front of anyone before. But it felt right tonight.” A star in Addis Ababa in the 1970s, Mergia quit Ethiopia after an American tour in 1981, fed up of the restrictions of a hardline government and playing 12-hour curfew-busting gigs for little reward. Mergia made Washington DC his home, where he still makes a living driving a taxi. In its boot is a portable keyboard for when the muse grabs him. His primary band, the Walias, were hardly forgotten (this writer was given a C90 of what sounded like blazing 1960s Hammond grooves in 1990), but it took an American in Ethiopia discovering an album recorded in America by the Ethiopian, before anybody had the bright idea of reissuing his music and getting him back in the studio. And 2018 finds Mergia’s trio on tour in Europe, laying waste to a former abattoir in Paris’s arty 19th arrondissement. Afterwards, my notes suggest that C90 did not lie – “Booker T… Jimmy Smith… Dave ‘Baby’ Cortez... Jackie Mittoo” and, slightly anachronistically, “not Kimmo Pohjonen” for one of his accordion numbers – but there’s much more to soak in. Abechu has the funk of the Starsky & Hutch theme, sure, while Mona Lisa points to a great love for Nat King Cole, but with strong tell-tale Ethiopian scales. These crop up, too, on Asnakech, transforming its dub Jamaican opening into a recognition of the countries’ bond. The set, though all instrumental, makes no secret of Mergia’s feelings for his homeland. There’s a tribute to the revered singer Asnakech Worku; New Gujam references north-west Ethiopia; Gurage is named after an ethnic group. And Yefkir Engurguro, that emotional closer, is about the Ethiopian’s interpretation of a universal feeling, according to its author: “When you love somebody, it’s as if you are in mourning.” But who goes to a gig to mourn? Instead, feel the years fly away as the organist entertains: Yane Abebanash kicks in with a nod to Jimmy McGriff’s I’ve Got A Woman, segues into a 12-bar blues, weaves in a touch of Giorgio Moroder, takes it home with the irresistible swing of Soul Limbo and finishes off with a Morricone movement on melodica. Taxi for Mergia? Definitely not yet…
“FEEL THE YEARS FLY AWAY AS THE ORGANIST ENTERTAINS.”