For Émigré Fans, Soothing Words and Spirited Rhythms From Home

By JON PARELES, The New York Times

Women squealed as the headliner took the stage at the S.O.B.’s nighclub in New York late on Friday night, elegant in a dark suit with a yellow necktie. He started an anthemic ballad, and within moments, the audience was joyfully singing along and waving its arms overhead. The pop star onstage was Gossaye Tesfaye, a 32-year-old songwriter from Ethiopia, and he was singing love songs in the Amharic language. The crowd that filled the dance floor at 1 a.m. must have made up a considerable fraction of the 2,500 Ethiopians that the last census counted as living in New York City.

Mr. Tesfaye, who was born in Addis Ababa, plays modern pop that is well aware of the world outside Ethiopia. The song that started his set could almost have been an American R&B ballad but for its vocals, and he followed it with a song that rode the brisk Afro-Latin beat of Congolese soukous. On his albums Mr. Tesfaye also dips into reggae and Nigerian Afrobeat. His band used Western instruments: bass, trap drums, keyboard, saxophone.

But the melodies of Mr. Tesfaye’s songs were distinctively Ethiopian. They riffled up and down through pentatonic (five-note) scales, and when he sang sustained notes, they took on North African, Arabic-flavored quavers. Mr. Tesfaye has a high, sweet tenor voice that can break into a rich falsetto or add a hint of rasp; his tone is clear and genial, never pushy but never shy.

As the set progressed, the band’s rhythms made their way back toward Ethiopia. One song moved to a brusquely swinging modal funk vamp that, to a Western ear, sounded something like Louisiana zydeco. Other tunes built galloping six-beat grooves that stirred up the dance floor. As the music dug into its homeland beats, Mr. Tesfaye tossed phrases back and forth with his saxophonist and with an audience that was eager to sing along or clap the complexities of those six-beat rhythms. Women climbed onstage to dance with him and pose for cellphone photographs; one plastered paper money on his forehead. What had started out looking like a typical pop event had turned into something unmistakably African.