I started down this rabbit hole because of Mulatu Astatke. Most people who discover Ethiopian jazz do — the Heliocentrics collaboration, or the Broken Flowers soundtrack, or just the overwhelming evidence of Ethio Jazz sitting there, asking to be heard. Mulatu opened the door for me and I walked through it and discovered that the room behind it was much larger than I'd expected. Ethiopian music has a history and a present that most Western listeners encounter only through the Ethio jazz lens, which is a beautiful lens but an incomplete one. What's happening now in Addis Ababa's underground — the younger musicians, the connections between traditional forms and electronic production, the new generation's relationship with a heritage that is both resource and weight — that's a story I've been trying to get to the edges of.
Meseret Wolde is one of the artists I keep coming back to. Her voice has a quality that I find difficult to situate — it's clearly rooted in Ethiopian musical tradition, the microtonal inflections and the particular relationship between melodic line and lyrical delivery that characterises Amharic music, but it's also in conversation with jazz and with something more contemporary. There's a precision to her phrasing that suggests formal training, and an expressiveness that suggests something more fundamental. She sounds like someone who learned the rules and then made the rules serve the music.
The Pentatonic Scale as Portal
Ethiopian music's relationship with the pentatonic scale — more specifically, with a series of pentatonic modes called the qenet system, each with its own emotional and cultural associations — gives it a quality that Western ears often read as simultaneously ancient and strangely accessible. The pentatonic is familiar territory for most listeners; it's the foundation of the blues, of much folk music, of children's songs. But the Ethiopian use of it is not the same as the blues use of it. The intervals are tuned differently. The melodic logic is different. The emotional register is different.
What happens when contemporary Ethiopian musicians work in jazz contexts — or post-jazz contexts, or electronic contexts — is a kind of productive collision. The rhythmic vocabulary of jazz meets a melodic vocabulary that operates on different assumptions. The results, when they work, are extraordinary. When I first heard Meseret Wolde's work placed in a setting that included jazz harmony, I felt the particular excitement of something unexpected that turns out to be inevitable — yes, of course these things fit together. Why hasn't this been happening more?
The Underground That Doesn't Need Us
There is something I want to be careful about here, which is the Western tendency to discover and celebrate things that were already perfectly fine without being discovered and celebrated. The Addis Ababa music scene doesn't need my approval. It is not waiting to be found by European or American writers. It has its own audiences, its own venues, its own critical frameworks, its own internal debates. What I'm doing when I write about it is bringing it into a conversation it was not absent from — only absent from my conversation, which is a very particular and limited thing.
I think the honest version of this, the version that isn't colonial celebration, is to say: I have found something I didn't know, and it has expanded what I think music can be, and I'm grateful, and the appropriate response to that gratitude is to listen carefully and say what I hear as accurately as I can, without claiming to have discovered anything. Meseret Wolde has been doing this work. The scene in Addis has been developing. I arrived late to the party and the party is good.
I keep seeking out more. The connections keep multiplying. Every record leads to three others. I suspect I'll be in this rabbit hole for the rest of my listening life, and I am entirely at peace with that.
The music teaches me to hear differently, and that's the highest compliment I can pay anything. Every artist I've listened to who comes from a tradition I didn't grow up with has expanded what I'm capable of hearing, has added new receptors. Meseret Wolde added several. I'm listening to everything differently now. That seems like it matters.
