Ethiopiques - "strange and wonderful" - Costello

[johnfoyle]

Back in the '90s when Elvis regularly co-hosted a Irish radio show he kept playing tracks from a series of albums of 1970s Jazz by Ethiopian musicians. Indeed , to my ears, their influence can be heard in the brass effects on WIWC. A sampler album is coming out next week and Elvis is quoted in the publicity material , getting a reference in media write-ups.





http://www.unionsquaremusic.co.uk/title ... LABEL_ID=2


Sleevenotes

(extract)

"This is a unique record release series, much of it from the glorious explosion of soulful, sorrowful and joyful music cut between the repression of absolute monarchy and the cultural insanity of the Derg regime. The spoilt complaints of Western pop musicians pale into insignificance compared to the defiant human spirit contained in these recordings.

Do yourself a favour and discover the Ethiopian R&B counterparts to James Brown, Elvis Presley and Jackie Wilson but also jazz composers, choral groups, folk minstrels and bluesmen with power and wildness of Bukka White or Son House, or contemplative piano music that might suggest Bill Evans or Maurice Ravel for a moment, but is really from a strange and wonderful place of its own."

Elvis Costello

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jh ... thi111.xml


Arresting: the police band provided a springboard for numerous Ethiopiques musicians


Ethiopiques: Addis Ababa-baloola-a-wop-bam-boom!

The Daily Telegraph

11/08/2007

Ethiopia was once known only for disasters. But its strange and wonderful music is a revelation, says Peter Culshaw


Francis Falceto's life changed in April 1984 when someone played him a record at a party in Poitiers.

"A friend of mine was a stage manager for a theatre troupe who had been touring Africa and had bought an LP by Mahmoud Ahmed in a music shop in Addis Ababa. I was astonished - it seemed like some missing link of music. So I thought, 'What else is there?' Even though I knew nothing about Ethiopia or Ethiopian music, it seemed a good place to investigate. So I got on a plane to Addis the next month and invited Mahmoud Ahmed to tour."

Since then, much of Falceto's time has been spent on Ethiopian music. This month he was on tour again with Ahmed, who is at last being recognised as one of the world's great singers, this year winning a Radio 3 World Music Award. Since 1997, Falceto has produced a series of 21 fascinating compilations of Ethiopian music called Éthiopiques, of which a best-of selection is being released as a double album on Monday.

The series, always well-regarded, now seems to be breaking out of its cult following, with champions including Elvis Costello, who in the publicity material for the compilation suggests we investigate this "strange and wonderful" music.

British-based Indian singer Susheela Raman did a cover of a Mahmoud Ahmed song as the title track of her album Love Trap, and even has an "Ethiopian version" of Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone on her forthcoming album. But what propelled the music into chic drawing rooms more than anything else was the use of the enigmatic jazz of Mulatu Astatke in Jim Jarmusch's 2005 film Broken Flowers.

When Falceto first went to Ethiopia, in 1984, it was the year of famine and starvation. The country was governed by the Derg, a communist military junta that ruled from 1974 to 1987, which had imposed a curfew when took it power after Haile Selassie was ousted.

"Aside from the problems with the famine, the curfew and the censorship were very bad for the music and the nightlife," says Falceto. "I realised I had missed the great years of Ethiopian pop music."

Some musicians, such as Astatke, were drafted by the Derg in the 1970s to write stirring socialist-realist tunes celebrating the achievements of the revolution. Most of the releases in the Éthiopiques series are from what Falceto calls "the Golden Years" - the 1960s and early '70s, the dying years of Haile Selassie's regime.

The year of his visit was also the year of Live Aid, and Ahmed told me when I met him at the Radio 3 World Music Awards that he had shown Bob Geldof around Addis Ababa (Geldof has attracted considerable criticism for not using Ethiopian, or indeed African, musicians at Live Aid and Live .

Live Aid was, asserts Falceto, bad for the music of Ethiopia. "It created this cliché, which Ethiopians are mortified by, of the country as a kind of desert where everyone is dying of hunger. It's a mountainous country that is quite green - the problems in 1984 were more to do with geopolitical struggles in the Cold War than anything else. And Addis is a very sophisticated city, with plenty of rich people as well as poor."

Apart from its distinctive and rather oriental five-note scales, Falceto suggests that what makes Ethiopia so unique musically is the fact that "unlike any other African country, it has been independent for 3,000 years, apart from the six years the Italians were colonists." The only real outside influences in the 1950s and '60s were big-band music from the States, including Glen Miller, and later soul.

"Haile Selassie formed numerous brass bands for ceremonial purposes and they also played light music in the hotels," explains Falceto. "The result was something wild - the biggest stars sang in police and army bands. Mahmoud Ahmed was a member of the Imperial Bodyguard Band for years." Alemayehu Eshete, often dubbed "the Ethiopian James Brown", was the star vocalist with the Police Orchestra.

I meet Falceto in Toulouse, because he has finally found what he thinks is a world-class Ethiopian-style band in Les Tigres des Platanes, a French jazz group who he is recording alongside the Ethiopian chanteuse Etenesh Wassie. Something to celebrate along with the Ethiopian millennium this September - as the country uses the Coptic as opposed to the Gregorian calendar, it is still 1999 there.

As Falceto puts it, "It's a little behind the rest of us, but the world is finally discovering how great the music of Ethiopia is."

# 'The Very Best of Éthiopiques' is released on Monday on Manteca Records.

Longer account here -


http://arts.independent.co.uk/music/fea ... 849625.ece


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopiques

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ethiopiques-Ver ... 736&sr=8-1

[Who Shot Sam?]

I have a bunch of these and they make for wonderful listening. There is something almost otherworldly about the sound of these recordings. I can't recommend them highly enough to adventurous listeners.

[johnfoyle]

http://www.charliegillett.com/phpBB2/vi ... php?t=4960

Gordon posts-


Yup, I can confirm that (to my ears) this is a terrific collection. It’s hardly surprising, given the plaudits that the 21 (22?) CD series has received over the years. I suspect that a lot of people are a bit like me and might have bought one or two in the series, but couldn’t face shelling out for the whole lot. Well, this is the perfect solution. Although the title of ‘Very Best of..‘ isn’t true. I mean, it doesn’t have my favourite track, Bahta Gèbrè-Heywèt’s ‘Tèssassètgn Eko’ from volume 8. Honestly! What were they thinking of?

But there’s lots to enjoy in this double CD. I do like these culture clashes, where Western music collides with other cultures. You can always go and dig up loads of roots by the shovelful, but these periods of mutant music are a bit of a one-off in time, never to be repeated. A lot of the tracks here are instrumentals, largely sax-driven. Some sound like big band music, some like jazz, some like cool supper club music, some like soul (.Alèmayèhu Eshèté does a fair take on James Brown).

The real joys for me, however, are the tracks that I didn’t expect. The piano instrumental ‘Mother's Love‘, which opens up the second CD, has the tone of a Chopin nocturne but with an added jazzy slinkiness. However, it is the last track, Alèmu Aga’s ’Abatatchen Hoy (Pater Noster)’, which is my current favourite. Dominated by some kind of buzzy instrument (a six-foot Jew’s harp?) Alèmu Aga sings, or rather mutters, quietly and intimately, almost as if his mouth is squashed close up to the insides of my speakers.

[johnfoyle]

http://www.charliegillett.com/very_best_ethiopiques.htm

Various Artists
The Very Best of Ethiopiques
Manteca


Charlie Gillett writes -

As I write, this album of Ethiopian tracks recorded in the early 1970s is #12 in Amazon.co.uk’s list of best-selling compilations. Most of those above it, and many below, are advertised on TV. This album has nothing but word-of-mouth going for it, apart of course from the wonderful music contained within. But how many great albums have each of us championed, which have sold next-to-nothing? So why has this collection broken through into the promised land previously reached only by O Brother Where Art Thou and Buena Vista Social Club, finding its way into homes that have never had such a record on their shelves before?

Is it all down to Elvis Costello, whose words of praise have been used on the cover? By now, it has probably sold more copies than his own most recent album, which is sometimes how strangely these things can work. Back in 1994 Ry Cooder had never sold many records under his own name, yet his name was the original lure on first the duo album with Ali Farka Touré and then the Cuban collaboration that was called The Buena Vista Social Club.

Anyway, the point is, what have people landed up with, when they start to listen to the album they have bought more or less unheard? Instrumentally, the music is surprisingly familiar – saxophone, piano and organ are the dominant features, and some of the instrumental tracks sound like the kind of thing you might hope to hear in a hotel or bar in Addis Ababa, background music but with languid melodies that become indelible after a few plays. Vocally, it’s stranger, as the singers follow a different kind of melody than we are accustomed to. A distant cousin of jazz, soul and funk, always with a Horn of Africa character.

This album is culled from a series of more than twenty compilations under the name Ethiopiques, drawn from music released by small Ethiopian record labels during the late 1960s and early 1970s on vinyl singles and albums, most of which were not heard at the time outside the country. Still ongoing, the series has been curated, compiled and annotated by Francis Falceto, who has dedicated his life to the project while being obliged to make a living doing other things. No professionally-paid person would ever have spent so much time and trouble, or done it so well.

The compilers Iain Scott and Steve Bunyan have whittled Francis’ discoveries down to 28 tracks, of which about one third are instrumentals. If their principle was that these are more accessible than the vocals, the remarkable sales seem to support it. In the original series, Volume 4 was all instrumental, introducing us to the saxophonist Tesfa Maryam Kidané, whose insidious, slinky tone keeps drawing attention here.

Among the vocal tracks, four are by Mahmoud Ahmed, the singer who has benefited most from Francis’ support and who was named Best African Artist at this year’s Radio 3 awards for World Music. Both sides of his most famous single, ‘Erè Mèla Mèla’, Parts One and Two, are here, but one of the revelations for me is another, intensely funky version of the same song, by Sèyfu Yohannès. I must have heard it before, on the original volume of Ethiopiques that included it, but here it jumps out as if brand new.

If you have never heard this music, an adventure awaits. You may be unsettled at first, but after a while you’ll wonder why you found it unusual. It has always belonged to all of us. We just didn’t know it.

A aspect of this is discussed here -

http://www.charliegillett.com/phpBB2/vi ... php?t=5748

Topic -

'How much are the Ethiopiques artists getting?'

[Otis Westinghouse]

Thanks, John, for the link. I knew there'd been some discussion here, but you've saved me the search. SO far, I've played CD1, especially the first three songs. It's amazing stuff. An incredible blend of sounds and influences, and the historical notes on the cultural setting that gave birth to it all are remarkable. Trul essential and amazing listening.

[johnfoyle]

Ethiopiques play Dublin - at last!

Well , Dun Laoghaire , very near Dublin...

http://www.festivalofworldcultures.com/

I've just booked for the show on Fri. Aug. 22.

[martinfoyle]

Just today the boss at Freebird was telling me he sells a steady 5 or 6 copies of the compilation cd a week, no mean feat these days. All word of mouth, he'll shift a fair few more copies in the run up to the gig. Meanwhile the solitary vinyl copy of Momofuku decorates the wall behind him, he'll probably shift it a Christmas.

[Otis Westinghouse]

Look forward to hearing about that, John, especially as the entirely wonderful Mulatu Astatke is part of it. His pieces on the compilation are amazing. Familiar in terms of some of the elements, but also unlike anything you've heard before. Quite a lot of them ended up in the US, I recall from the notes, and several dead. Good that they've got the recognition to tour internationally.

[johnfoyle]

This recent feature fills in what the surviving musician's are doing -

http://music.guardian.co.uk/jazz/story/ ... 66,00.html

[johnfoyle]

Last night show was great fun. Two hours of nearly continuous music did it's best to encapsulate and present the Ethiopiques sound and mood. Seeing as how most of the original musicians on the 1970's recordings are, sadly, no longer with us it was acceptable that Boston's Either/Orchestra recreated the sound. Being fronted by three of the front men from the time made it all worth while.

It started with Mulatu Astatqe on vibes, his mellow sounds easing us into the brassy, rhythmic sound. ThenAlemayehu Eshete came on, his 'James Brown' style act drawing hoots and roars from those of us standing in front of the stage. That packed area couldn't help but sway along to the numbers , making for a much more involving experience than for those (as some told me later) seated in the balcony. This continued with Mahmoud Ahmed who, while not as outrageous as Alemayehu , delighted with his call and response delivery and energetic body popping. The show finished with the three men joining the ensemble to fashion a full-on ending. Mighty stuff!

Seeing as how a lot of us first heard Ethiopiques on Irish radio when Elvis Costello played them when co-hosting episodes of John Kelly's show in 2001/02, it was not surprising that John introduced last night's concert. Starting by saying he never thought he'd see the day that these musicians would get to Ireland, he continued with a comment ' When these recording were first brought to me....' and so on. Perhaps he chose his words carefully and decided not to mention Elvis seeing as how, common with nearly every gig I see in Dublin these days, the tall presence of one Cait O'Riordan was evident in the foyer before the show!

http://either-orchestra.org/

[Otis Westinghouse]

Sounds great. Do you think Cait thinks she has a stalker? Or maybe it's the other way round...

[johnfoyle]

http://www.lukemp3.com/francis-falceto- ... nce-award/

9 August 2011

Francis Falceto Wins WOMEX 2011 Professional Excellence Award


Frenchman Francis Falceto is the winner of WOMEX 2011′s Professional Excellence Award. Francis Falceto is the originator and curator of the Ethiopiques series of CDs and the music of Ethiopia’s greatest champion.

He will receive his Award on Sunday morning, 30 October 2011, at the Awards Ceremony accompanied by a WOMEX Networking Breakfast, both open to WOMEX delegates only. The laudation will be offered by writer and producer Joe Boyd (UK).

“Falceto has single-handedly brought Ethiopian music to the forefront of world music consciousness,” says Joe Boyd. “In addition to the CD series that now numbers 27 volumes, he has organized concerts and tours, an annual festival in Addis Ababa, published the book “Abyssinie Swing“, created a documentary film of the same name and brought Western musicians intrigued by the music to Ethiopia.

Having first heard an Ethiopian recording in 1984, by 1986 he had visited Addis Ababa twice and managed to escape the strict controls of the military government bringing with him both the singer Mahmoud Ahmed (for whom he had arranged an appearance at the Avignon Festival) and the tapes of Ahmed’s great Ere Mela Mela album, soon to be released on Crammed Discs.

By the time his partnership with Buda Records for the Ethiopiques series began in 1997, Francis had tracked down master tapes from the most important labels and producers of the Golden Age. The huge impact of the series is well known. Jim Jarmusch is obviously a fan, having used an Ethiopiques track for the title music of his Bill Murray film Broken Flowers. Patti Smith, Elvis Costello and Tom Waits, have all gone on record with their adoration of the CDs. But it perhaps less appreciated how Francis’ attention to detail, from programming to design, to notes, to mastering – have defined this body of work that has become virtually the sole representation of an essential musical culture to critics, presenters and an ever growing legion of fans.

If Falceto’s work was limited to the curation of this brilliant series of discs, that alone would be a claim to fame and to our respect. But, much as he adores the legacy of those Golden Years, it is the living music that is most important to him. The brilliant orchestras that we hear on those Golden Era recordings have evaporated and few young musicians have emerged to take their place; drum machines and synthesizers are everywhere.

Francis’ work in building a road out of this cultural dead-end street is perhaps his most important accomplishment. Aware of the impact Ethiopiques was having on musicians in Europe and North America, he has worked tirelessly to bring groups such as the Either/Orchestra, Le Tigre des Platanes, X, and the Imperial Tiger Orchestra to Addis to take part in festivals and to work with local singers and musicians. Ethiopians are astonished and stimulated by the fluency of these foreigners in performing their complex music.

The business of “world music” runs not on the fuel of financial ambition but on the fumes of musical passion. Francis Falceto has set a new standard for aficionados: he has chosen for us with impeccable taste, he has packaged and presented the music in a way that stimulates the market, he has followed through with concerts that provoke and inspire both within Ethiopia and without. He has provided us with a textbook example of the perfect pursuit of a passion.”