The golden age of Ethiopian soul music kicked off in the mid ’60s
with a flurry of horns, eerie keyboards, and whip-crack drumming. Woven
through the groove was the strained, conflicted voice of Mahmoud Ahmed,
the greatest pop star the country has ever seen.
Ethiopia has a history of brutal dictatorships; Ahmed’s hazy, gritty
sound offers a glimpse into the once-vibrant culture of nightclubs and
beer halls of Addis Ababa (aka “swinging Addis”). Ahmed was known as
“the soul of Addis,” his vibrato registering what the Ethiopians call
achinoy, an expression of beautiful, strained suffering, and
eskeusta, a sort of ecstasy that inspires a wave of tingling
sensations to flow through the body.
In the early 1960s, during the reign of the “enlightened despot”
Haile Selassie—whom present-day Rastafarians consider both God
and the son of God—Ahmed went from being a shoeshine boy to the
leader of the Imperial Bodyguard Band (all the bands were government
funded and had names like the Police and Army Orchestra). Music was
everywhere, easily absorbed. After years of listening to the R&B
music thousands of Peace Corps volunteers imported into the country, he
had developed an anomalous voice that amalgamated American funk and
Ethiopian brass-band music.
“Elvis Presley and James Brown started playing in the music shops,”
Ahmed says over the phone from Addis Ababa, with his local publicist,
Teferi Abay, acting as translator. “This was all I listened to. We put
traditional Amharic songs into these contemporary settings. That was
the modern Ethiopian sound.”
Ahmed became one of the country’s first pop stars, imitating the
dress of Little Richard and the stage presence of Elvis. Motown-like,
his specialty became the love song, dripping with poetic melodrama. He
sang in Amharic, racy/sacred sentiments like, “Your body is a love
trap/there is no way I can’t adore it” and “What words can I choose to
describe you/You are utterly sublime/God created you perfect, without
blemish.” The music charged behind him in a pulsing, danceable
wave.
When Mengistu Haile Mariam’s abominable Marxist junta replaced
Selassie’s already repressive regime in 1974, Ahmed’s government band
was cut off and the country’s musical culture was forced into hiding.
Mengistu enforced a 10:00 p.m. curfew and shut down nightlife.
Musicians were forbidden to release albums and thrown in jail for
writing love songs that might contain clandestine antigovernment
lyrics. For 13 years, it was nearly impossible to tour outside of
Ethiopia. The few dozen singers that remained working in the country,
including Ahmed, maintained covert recording careers and were forced to
play
in international hotel lounges, to tourists,
after
hours.
“During the Mengistu regime, audiences in the hotels had to come in
at 11:30 and couldn’t leave until 5:00 a.m.,” Ahmed says. “That was the
way we played music in Ethiopia.”
In 1986, French music producer Francis Falceto discovered
Erè mèla mèla, Ahmed’s debut album, and
the first “Ethiopian groove” record released in Europe, 11 years after
its recording. Inspired by Ahmed’s raw, funk-fueled sound, Falceto
began compiling the Ethiopiques series, ensuring Ahmed’s voice would
finally reach America. In the same way that the Buena Vista Social Club
illuminated an entire generation of neglected Cuban music, the 23-disc
Ethiopiques series revealed this forgotten period of sizzling Ethiopian
jazz rock. Modern indie acts like Castanets and Broken Social Scene
tout the series as a prime influence, and Jim Jarmusch’s Broken
Flowers was basically an excuse for the director to indulge his
love of Ethiopian funk.
Now, 16 years after the fall of Mengistu, Ahmed is one of the few
pop stars to emerge from the darkness. “Still there is censorship,”
Ahmed says. “If you want to give a message
other than love songs,
you cannot.”
Yet his musical personality remains unscathed. Because of the
country’s isolationist government, Ahmed’s poppier take on Afrobeat
never found the international popularity of his Nigerian, Malian, or
Senegalese contemporaries. The 15,000 albums he’s sold in a 40-year
career are actually a lot by Ethiopian standards.
After being presented with Ethiopia’s prestigious Millennium Award
three months ago, Ahmed began a rare international tour. In his
all-white garb, he set out on a long string of sold-out shows, running
the stage with swinging fists and gyrating hips, parading with his
characteristic strut. Backing him is what he calls the “new generation
of Ethiopian music,” turning his ’60s soul-jazz arrangements into
full-blast rock. In the audience, Ethiopian immigrants, groove junkies,
and world-music fans come together to hear one of the few survivors of
Ethiopia’s golden age send waves of eskeusta up their spines.
