A defining taste of Ethiopian jazz
Francis Falceto with Ethiopian music legend Mahmoud Ahmed
Westerners who are fond of Africa sometimes have defining moments when they go ‘crazy’ for African culture; finding an artwork, a tasty new dish or a song played on the radio that inspires them to learn more, taste more, hear more.
This is what happened to Francis Falceto, the Frenchman involved in Ethiopiques, to be performed at WOMADelaide (with legend Mahmoud Ahmed) this March 2010. It’s a performance inspired by the 20-CD Ethiopiques music series that Falceto put together for Buda music, CDs widely credited for bringing Ethiopian music to an international audience.
According to Falceto his involvement in Ethiopian music “started from a flash” at a party in the French countryside. “A friend of ours… had toured Africa with a French theatre troupe… By chance he’d bought this Mahmoud Ahmed LP in Ethiopia. And at night when he put the LP on the turntable, we went absolutely crazy! We’d never heard such African music! It was even hard to believe it was African music, because when you look at the cover of the LP the writing was so strange… I mean I was very ignorant.
“I had an incredible flash. I made cassette copies out of this LP, and sent them to friends of mine, music journalists and music critics – supposedly knowing a lot about music from Africa – and by the following days all of them came back to me saying ‘Francis, what is that?’ and ‘where did you get it from?’ So I understood it was very good and amazing music and at the same time it wasn’t known.
“At the time I was working with friends in a non-profit organisation organising concerts of very weird music, very strange, not specially commercial. So we decided, OK, let’s go, bring the men back and make concerts with them. That’s how it started.”
After a few years, he decided to dedicate his time to researching the history and music of Ethiopia during its ‘Golden Era’, 1960s and early 70s – when Ethiopian music was still influenced by Big-Band Jazz, and there were very ‘groovy’ but still uniquely Ethiopian tunes from music legends like Alèmayèhu Eshèté, Mahmoud Ahmed and Mulatu Astatqé (whose music was recently featured in the film ‘Broken Flowers’).
Francis worked hard to put it all on LP and soon CDs available to an international audience. In the mid to late 1980s, he began with Mahmoud Ahmed’s Erè Mèla Mèla’, followed by CDs featuring other Ethiopian legends, and by the late 1990s, the Ethiopiques music series was born.
According to Francis it wasn’t hard to see why a select international audience began to fall in love with the music: “The beauty of the voice and beauty of the arrangements, the melody, this strange petatonic scale, these incredible arrangements, horn sections, saxaophone and big band… whoo! For me, it’s very easy to listen to, it sounds very familiar at some point. I don’t mean it’s easy listening music, but it’s easy to listen to.”
For Western audiences, it’s often a surprise to hear such music originates in Ethiopia. “They are surprised in the sense that – how can such music come from Ethiopia? You know all the clichés we have about this country,” says Francis. “We can’t imagine how a country we know as a kingdom of drought and famine, how can they release such beautiful music? …But if you look at the documents/photos in the booklets (in the Ethiopiques series), there are many kinds of these big bands, man and woman, it’s absolutely amazing. It’s not fair, the cliché that the media has spread about this country, that has totally disrupted the reality image of the country, especially the musical culture that is incredibly rich and gorgeous.”
For Francis, this ‘richness’ was mainly in its ‘Golden Era’. He says music development in Ethiopia came to an abrupt end after the 1974 revolution, after Haile Selassie was overthrown and the military Derg regime (led by Mengistu) came to power. “This absolutely crushed the development of Ethiopian music at that time,” says Francis. “Imagine the city you are living in – 18 years without night life, without music development, with censorship, with obligation and propaganda for the few artists who could continue to perform, once a week on Saturday night in some chique hotel (because Addis Ababa is a capital city not only for Ethiopia but Organisation for African Unity, lots of NGOs, diplomats) And this was the only way to meet music life at that time… You had to be locked the whole night in the nightclub or the hotel, because of the curfew. You couldn’t go outside. So there was no condition for (music) development.”
He says even when a new government came to power in the early 1990s, it took some time for the music scene to pick up. “When the curfew was lifted in 1992 I was there. It was amazing for me to take a walk at night. It was absolutely deserted… It was difficult for them to restart nightlife. It takes years to rise out of this long sleep. It’s a kind of adventure to go out on the street at night when you’ve been familiar with only staying at home.
“The new generation is improving a lot, they have a lot of hopes, but it’s developing very, very slowly… In the past 3 or 4 years I’m seeing some interesting phenomenon musically speaking. Talents rising out of the blue. More nightclubs, more cabarets opening with very groovy music. So we’ll see about the future. But at the moment you cannot compare the music scene in Addis Ababa to what it was 40 years ago.”
Ethiopiques now includes some more recent Ethiopian bands and performances, continuing to help overturn what Francis sees as an unfair image of the country. He says, “Ethiopia is the victim of media coverage that is totally clichéd; it deserves a more open-minded coverage. For me, for the good and the bad, the promotion of Ethiopian music through Ethiopiques has obviously helped to change the image of the country. Ethiopians can feel it, and they are very proud of the crossover of their musical culture, which is partly surprising, because they are so nationalist… because historically they have been independent for 3,000 years and have never been colonised so they look at other people with a kind of pride you don’t meet in other African countries in the same way. At first I was wondering what they’d think about this absorption of musical culture by the world, but they’re very proud. It’s part of the acknowledgement of the country.”
Ethiopian music legend Mahmoud Ahmed will perform with Ethiopiques at Womadelaide held in Adelaide’s Botanic Gardens in March – details at www.womadelaide.com.au
Further information on the Ethiopiques music series:
Ethiopian Music on AfroPop
Ethiopiques.info website
Ethiopiques on Wikipaedia
