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Music & Dance

Ethio-Jazz: How Mulatu Astatke Gave Ethiopia Its Own Jazz

Mysterious minor melodies, vibraphone and horns: Ethio-jazz mixes Ethiopian modes with American jazz. Here is the story of the sound and the man who created it.

By Amos Hope Jnr · · 3 min read

Illustration of a jazz band with vibraphone and saxophone playing to a candlelit club audience in 1970s Addis Ababa

If you have seen Jim Jarmusch's 2005 film Broken Flowers, you have heard it: a slow, hypnotic groove, a melody that sounds both melancholy and mysterious, played on a vibraphone over brushed drums and warm horns. The film's soundtrack leans on songs such as "Yèkèrmo Sèw", and the man behind it — and behind a whole genre — is Mulatu Astatke, the father of Ethio-jazz.

A young man abroad

Mulatu Astatke was born in 1943 in Jimma, in southwestern Ethiopia. In the 1950s, his family sent him to Britain to study engineering. Instead, he discovered music. He studied at Trinity College of Music in London, playing in clubs and absorbing jazz and Latin music.

In 1958, he went to the United States and became the first African student at the school that would become Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he took up the vibraphone. He then spent several years in New York, playing with Latin jazz musicians and recording albums that mixed Ethiopian melodies with mambo, soul and jazz.

Ethiopian modes meet jazz

Ethiopian music has its own system of scales, known as qenet, which give it a distinctive sound. The four main modes are often named:

  • Tizita — associated with nostalgia and longing (the word means roughly "memory");
  • Bati — named after a town in northeastern Ethiopia;
  • Ambassel — named after a mountain;
  • Anchihoye — the most unusual, with an exotic, unsettled feel.

Most are pentatonic, using five notes. Mulatu's idea was to keep these Ethiopian melodies and modes at the centre, and surround them with the harmonies, rhythms and instruments of jazz: vibraphone, saxophones, trumpets, electric organ, bass and drums. He called the result "Ethio-jazz."

Swinging Addis

Mulatu returned to Ethiopia in the late 1960s, just as Addis Ababa was enjoying a remarkable musical boom. In the final years of Emperor Haile Selassie's reign, the capital's clubs, hotels and military and police bands were full of brilliant musicians. Singers such as Mahmoud Ahmed, Tlahoun Gèssèssè and Alèmayèhu Eshèté, and the saxophonist Gétatchèw Mèkurya, recorded for small independent labels. This period became known as "Swinging Addis."

Mulatu arranged and recorded for this scene, and his instrumental albums from the early 1970s, such as Mulatu of Ethiopia (1972), defined the Ethio-jazz sound.

Silence and rediscovery

The golden age ended abruptly. In 1974, a military junta, the Derg, overthrew the emperor, imposed curfews and censorship, and the nightlife that had nurtured the music largely disappeared. Many musicians left the country. Mulatu stayed, teaching and continuing to work.

Decades later, the music came back to life. From the late 1990s, the French record producer Francis Falceto released the Éthiopiques series, reissuing classic Ethiopian recordings for a global audience. Volume 4, dedicated to Mulatu's Ethio-jazz, became one of the most celebrated. Then came Broken Flowers, which used several of Mulatu's tracks, and a new generation of fans discovered him. Hip-hop artists sampled his music, and he began touring the world in his sixties and seventies, collaborating with bands such as the Heliocentrics.

Teacher and ambassador

Mulatu has spent much of his life promoting Ethiopian music and training younger musicians. He has researched traditional instruments, such as the krar (lyre), masenqo (one-string fiddle) and washint (flute), and worked on bringing them into modern orchestras. His work has helped make Ethiopia's musical heritage known far beyond the Horn of Africa — the same heritage that gives the country its distinctive calendar, script and church music.

Why it matters

Ethio-jazz shows that "jazz" is not one sound but an idea — a way of improvising that can grow in any musical soil. Mulatu Astatke did not copy American jazz; he invited it into Ethiopian music, on Ethiopian terms. More than half a century later, that conversation still sounds fresh, mysterious and utterly his own.

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