By Robin Denselow
The Guardian

It’s a scorching hot afternoon in a recording studio on the outskirts of the southern French city of Toulouse, and the talk is of music and Ethiopia. Inspired by the Ethiopiques albums compiled by French music producer Francis Falceto, local experimental jazz quartet Le Tigre Des Platanes have invited Ethiopian traditional singer Etenesh Wassie to work with them, and Falceto to oversee the project. Wassie can’t speak French and the band can’t speak Amharic, but the results are dramatic. Furious free-form brass and percussion are interspersed with declamatory, harsh-edged vocals, and there’s an extraordinary passage in which she duets with a wild solo saxophone. “That,” explains Falceto, “was a traditional Ethiopian greeting song.”

Mali may still dominate the African music scene, but the African sound that has built up the biggest following among musicians outside the continent in recent years is Ethiopian dance music – especially that from the “golden age” of the 1960s and early 70s, when, as Falceto puts it, Addis Ababa was “the African answer to swinging London” and boasted a famously wild nightlife. That era ended when Emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown by a military junta in 1974; regular curfews meant that clubs could no longer operate, and many musicians fled abroad.

This is the music that has been released on Falceto’s comprehensive Ethiopiques archive series (which will reach Volume 23 in the next few weeks, following the release of the new Very Best of Ethiopiques compilation) – Robert Plant, Elvis Costello and Temple of Sound are among its enthusiastic fans. Earlier this year, the most famous survivor from the era, Mahmoud Ahmed, was honoured at the BBC Radio 3 awards for world music, where the grey-haired singer gave a rousing performance and an impressive display of African pogo dancing.

Ethiopian music is very different from other African styles, perhaps because the country itself, with its long embrace of Christianity and no experience of western colonialism (though the Italians did invade the country in the second world war), has had such a different history. Musically, it has never been influenced by Cuban or other Latin styles, unlike west Africa. Instead, Ethiopian musicians looked to their own traditional music and to black America – a combination that came together in the extraordinary experiments of the 60s, when they created their gloriously distinctive fusion of local styles with American R&B, funk and free-form jazz.

Falceto has been rediscovering and reissuing that music, and transforming the world’s view of Ethiopia, since 1986, but it all started quite by chance. Back in 1984, he was working as a promoter, specialising in experimental music, free jazz and new music, when at a party a friend played an album by Mahmoud Ahmed that he’d bought in Ethiopia. Falceto was amazed: “I made cassettes and sent them to friends who knew about Africa, but they didn’t know about him.” He started travelling to Ethiopia (where the military was still in control), searched out Ahmed, who was then running a music store, and began to revive the singer’s career by arranging a European release for his now-celebrated Ere Mela Mela, originally recorded 11 years earlier. Then, realising there was “a music mine that had to be explored”, he started researching songs by other musicians from the era, and began the often-painstaking task of hunting down the original reel-to-reel masters of the vinyl recordings that he had heard.

In the process, he has become an expert in a remarkable period of African musical history, when politics dictated the rise and the fall of an experimental movement that in many ways echoed the 1960s musical revolution in the west. Emperor Haile Selassie played a key, if indirect role, because it was during his long rule that Ethiopia’s love affair with brass took off. Despite all those Rasta anthems about him, the Emperor’s musical taste veered less to reggae than to military brass bands, “because he realised that brass music was a symbol of power. It was music that impressed, but there had been no such tradition in Ethiopia,” Falceto explains.

Western brass instruments had been introduced to Ethiopia at the end of the 19th century as a gift from Tsar Nicholas. By the 1950s and early 60s, brass instruments played a key role in Ethiopian pop though, for much of this era, all bands were controlled by Selassie’s authorities, and no private orchestras were allowed. The best singers and players worked with such state-controlled outfits as the Police Band, the Haile Selassie Theatre Band, or (most importantly) the Imperial Bodyguard Band, which in the early 1960s included Mahmoud Ahmed. They received regular monthly salaries, like civil servants and played at state occasions and hotel dances.

Yet, as the Ethiopiques compilations show, there was nothing staid about these state bands, for they made sure that they checked out all the latest American hits, and then mixed them with local styles. It wasn’t just Mahmoud Ahmed who pioneered the new fusion. Other extraordinary singers of the era included Alemayehu Eshete, who started out with the Police Band and became known as the Ethiopian James Brown for his frantic funk workouts that retained an eastern-sounding, Ethiopian edge. There was also Tewelde Redda, who played an amplified version of the Ethiopian lyre, the krar, and was one of the first “electric guitarists” in Africa. And then there was the extraordinary Getatchew Mekurya, who played in the Haile Selassie Theatre Band and Police Band, and developed his unique style by listening to shellela, furious war cries used by armies before battle. When played on Mekurya’s saxophone, the result was like free-form jazz. “He was like Albert Ayler or Ornette Coleman,” says Falceto, “but he didn’t have any jazz records. He just did it!”

At the same time, a brave 26-year-old musician, Amba Eshete, dared to challenge the authority of the state by starting his own record label. His now-legendary vinyl releases, recorded in Ethiopia but manufactured in India, now make up much of the Ethiopiques collection.

Now thanks to Falceto, the music of the golden age has a new audience in the west, and though he has no plans to bring the survivors together for a Buena Vista Social Club-style show, he’s not ruling it out: “I’m ready to cooperate. I’d like to help other veterans the way I helped Mahmoud Ahmed.” He also notes that while Tewelde Redda and Alemayehu Eshete are still in good form, many musicians from the era are “living in misery when they should have a nice life because of their work”.

Lately, Falceto has been amazed by how contemporary western bands have responded to his Ethiopiques series by creating their own treatment of Ethiopian 60s styles, and has started taking those bands to Ethiopia. Boston’s Either Orchestra and the French Badoun Band have both made the trip: “People were shouting and crying even – they hadn’t seen a big band for 35 years!” he says. For his next project, there’s the fusion of French jazz and Ethiopian traditional styles that’s emerging from the Toulouse recording studio, to appear on his new contemporary music series, Ethiosonic. His obsession with the country has lasted for over two decades now, and he is still helping to transform Ethiopia’s image in the eyes of the world.
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The Very Best of Ethiopiques is released by Union Square on Monday.