Ethiopiques
Not so recently, I watched an excellent movie called Broken Flowers. Bill Murray plays a depressed, aging Don Juan who learns he has a son he didn’t know he had. His apparently rastafarian private eye friend sends him on a journey to connect with his exes to hunt down his son, and his son’s mother. The movie does a great job of making each meeting trick the audience into thinking that he has found his lost family, and so it keeps things interesting and mysterious. The mystery is also supported throughout the movie by an incredible soundtrack composed by an Ethiopian jazz musician/composer Mulatu Astatke. I’ll leave the specifics of his life to be discussed elsewhere, and focus on his unique musical style.
His music is clearly heavily influenced by the music of the west, but also feels distinctly foreign at times to my ears, which up to this point have been deprived of Ethiopian sounds. The drums in his music tend to be busy, but mixed (and/or played) very quietly for the most part. In addition to this, the drum parts include a mixture of traditional jazz kit playing, as well as some really unique (and I guess east African influenced) hand drum playing. There is an interesting rhythmic quality that emerges, and because it is all muted down below the level of the other instruments, it feels like these serve as a substrate on which the rest of the music is laid out.
The bass parts on the songs that I have heard are tightly coupled, compositionally to the melody parts, which are primarily on reeds (I think, but I’m not exactly sure what some of the instrumentation is), and on keys. The bass parts make use of scales that provide an interesting and mysterious quality that I think is uncommon in the music of the west. This, plus the meandering saxophone parts make for a really interesting and dynamic sound.
Learning about Mulatu Astatke by watching Broken Flowers has opened my eyes to an awesome collection of music of this style, all composed by composers from within, or around Ethiopia. This collection is called Ethiopiques, and was compiled to ensure that the incredible music made in this area is available. I am just now having a chance to familiarize myself with the albums individually, but even within the collection, there is a huge amount of diversity. Some is instrumental, some vocal. Some is very funky, some comes close to syrupy and more like a ballad than a dance track. All of it seems to have the interesting property that it combines some compositional techniques from the jazz of the 60s-80s with the distinct sound of Ethiopian traditional music, by way of lyrics, rhythm parts, or melodic structure. I hope to break down this collection with more detail, when I’ve had a chance to better digest it, and learn about the subtlety of each of its component albums.
