Why is everyone listening to Ethiopian jazz?

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN CRATE-DIGGING PURISTS, EAST LONDON LOFTS, AND A QUIET REJECTION OF THE BILLBOARD 200, ETHIO-JAZZ HAS BECOME THE SOUNDTRACK OF A CERTAIN KIND OF TASTE. BUT THIS ISN’T JUST AN AESTHETIC TREND, IT’S THE ECHO OF A MUSICAL REVOLUTION ROOTED IN EXPERIMENTATION, RESISTANCE, AND IDENTITY.

ONCE THRIVING IN THE NIGHTLIFE OF 1970S ADDIS ABABA, THEN FORCED UNDERGROUND, THIS MUSIC HAS SINCE BEEN REDISCOVERED, REISSUED, AND REVERED BY GLOBAL AUDIENCES FAR FROM ITS ORIGINS.

By Benjamin Sisay

You know the type. Lives in Hackney, works in something creative, and has strong opinions about coffee and stronger ones about music. The kind that would rather be found dead than listen to anything in the Billboard 200. Right now, that crowd is listening to Ethio-Jazz. But behind the Ethio-Jazz aesthetic is something much richer. A story of musical genius, political defiance, and a sound so unique that decades later, the rest of the world is still catching up.

We can't talk about Ethiopian jazz without Mulatu Astatke, widely known as the father of Ethio-jazz. Born in Ethiopia, he was sent to Wales to study engineering, until a school orchestra director told him: “It’s possible that you may become a good engineer, but your destiny is to be a musician.” And he took that seriously. 

Following formal training in London, New York, and Boston, he developed a hybrid musical language that integrates Ethiopian traditional music with Western jazz and Latin music. More technically, it relied on pentatonic five-note melodies drawn from Ethiopian styles, underlain by jazz harmonies from the twelve notes of the Western tonal system. That resulted in a blend that is hypnotic, slightly off-centre, and emotionally dense. When he brought that sound back to Ethiopia in the late 1960s, it electrified the capital, Addis Ababa, and transformed it into what came to be known as “Swinging Addis”. 

Astatke didn’t build this scene alone though. Others, like Hailu Mergia, heard what he was doing and ran with it. In the 1970s, Mergia was the keyboardist in the Walias Band, a jazz and funk group with a hard polyrhythmic sound influenced by Western artists like King Curtis, Junior Walker, and Maceo Parker. He took Astatke’s blueprint and pushed it further into funk and soul. While the band gained popularity nationally, playing in top hotels and the presidential palace, their relationship with the new communist Derg regime was complex. The regime demanded that musicians use their songs to promote the state and serve the revolution. His response was simple: if lyrics were the problem, remove them entirely. They sidestepped censorship by going fully instrumental in order to not become a propaganda tool. What that subtle defiance produced was magical. 

In 1977, Tche Belew, an album of instrumentals was released at a time when Addis Ababa’s nightlife was still active but increasingly constrained. It is built around swirling organ, polyrhythmic drums, and melodies so conversational they communicate as if someone were singing. The record became one of the clearest expressions of how Ethiopian modes could sit inside funk structures without losing their identity. 

Around the same time, Mergia slipped into a neighbouring hotel with a different set of musicians and recorded Wede Harer Guzo (1978), which was a looser and jazzier record. Unlike the driving energy of the former, this record leans into repetition and space, with accordion, organ, and subtle rhythmic shifts creating a more meditative atmosphere.

Mergia’s own story took a different turn. After the band defected during a US tour in the early 1980s, he remained in Washington DC, working as a taxi driver, his keyboard in the trunk, practising between fares. Decades later, those records were rediscovered and began to circulate globally. While they racked up millions of streams and introduced a new generation to the sound of Swinging Addis, Mergia was still driving his cab in DC, largely unaware that his music was quietly making him a cult figure.

If Mergia represented the earlier and funkier side of that world, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou stands as its most unlikely and quietly devastating chapter. Born in Addis Ababa in 1923 to a wealthy family, she was sent abroad for schooling, training in both violin and piano, and later studying under a Polish violinist in Cairo before returning to Ethiopia. What followed was a life shaped by contradiction. One moment she is performing piano compositions for the Emperor and serving as the first female secretary at Ethiopia's ministry of foreign affairs, the next, she has renounced it all and taken holy orders as a nun.

Her compositions were truly unique. I would describe them as sparse, meditative, and very personal. Unlike Astatke and Mergia, there are no horns and big arrangements, only piano that feels almost weightless. Pentatonic scales drift in and out of familiarity and time signatures appear to be constantly shifting. Yet her work sits within the same lineage of Ethiopian music reinterpreted through a global lens, as she also draws heavily from Western classical training and Ethiopian Orthodox chant in equal measure. 

The later decades of her life were spent in a monastery in Jerusalem, where she composed over 150 works and donated all proceeds from her recordings to educate orphaned children. She passed away in 2023 at the age of 99. The music, however, continues to find new listeners, quietly and across generations, as the most enduring work tends to do.

These three are far from the whole story, but they are a good place to start. Emahoy passed before I ever got the chance to see her perform, and Mergia rarely tours. But I was lucky enough to catch Mulatu sneaking into his sold-out show in Amsterdam a few years back, and then his farewell tour in London last year. 

Growing up in Ethiopia, this was music I heard everywhere. Yekermo Sew blasting from every shop and cafe, Tezeta playing softly at home on a quiet Sunday morning. You didn’t think about it, it was simply there. It was only when I moved abroad that I understood the global reach of his music. The demand for his tours wasn’t unusual. A quick look at Spotify and you’ll see London at the top of the listener charts for all three artists, followed by New York, Los Angeles, Melbourne, and Berlin. No Addis in sight. 

There’s something remarkable about that. Music born in the bars and hotel residencies of 1970s Addis Ababa, later suppressed and pushed underground, now finds its most devoted audience elsewhere. This wasn’t engineered with the kind of formal industry backing you would expect. Just record crates, film soundtracks and the slow spread of word of mouth. Maybe that tells us that the legends of yesterday don’t disappear. They are just waiting to be found again. But what about the new generation?

The story does not end there. Artists like Teddy Afro and Aster Aweke have carried Ethiopian music into the mainstream, translating elements of its sound for global audiences. But what excites me more is what is happening in the underground scene. A new generation of producers, including Dotphic and Nerliv, is continuing the legacy of blending Western and Ethiopian music by sampling and remixing the classics over contemporary electronic production. They are doing what Mulatu did with a vibraphone and a plane ticket, finding the universal in the local.