Posts filed under ‘Music’
Gigi is trying to make plans to return to her native Ethiopia
By Steve Hochman, Spinner.com:
Don’t book your flights quite yet. But if you’re a world music fan (and given that you’re reading this, you probably are), there may be something happening in early January that you’d want to see.
Of course, if it happens it will be in Addis Ababa. The singer known as Gigi is trying to make plans to return to her native Ethiopia (where she was born as Ejigayehu Shibabaw) for the first time since she left in 1997, hoping to play a concert in the capital on Jan. 7 – the Ethiopian Orthodox Christmas.
When she left, she was just an aspiring performer. But after settling in the US – first in San Francisco and later New York – she became a sensation in world music and beyond, endorsed and encouraged by fellow Ethiopian expat Aster Aweke, signed by Chris Blackwell (the man who built Island Records and turned Bob Marley into a global icon) to his Palm Pictures label and produced by eclectic innovator/bassist Bill Laswell (who later became her husband). It’s a rise that, she has been told, those at home followed with great interest. This would be the first time she’d gotten to perform for her Ethiopian fans.
“I really became famous after I got here,” she says, talking from her Manhattan home. “I made one record there, but it came out after I got here. I’m not sure, but from what I’ve heard from people I have a huge following there. A lot of people know my records.”
Whether you can go or not – whether she can go or not – you can get a taste of what it might be like, as Gigi has just released a live album, ‘Mesgana Ethiopia,’ her first in-concert collection and her first of any kind in more than four years. The band behind her sports international jazz and traditional music frontliners (the latest edition of Laswell’s Material, including adventurous American drummer Hamid Drake and Senegalese percussionist Aiyb Dieng, Ethiopian-Japanese keyboardist Abegasu Shiota, Zaire-born guitarist Dominic Kanza and a two-man horn section). And with her voice a fluid, powerful instrument, Gigi revisits and recharges songs from her studio albums, along with a pair of earthy traditional Ethiopian songs and one previously unrecorded original, ‘Shemum Mune.’ … Read More & Listen @ Spinner.com
Who is Mulatu Astatke
Mulatu Astatke (born 1943; surname also spelled Astatqé; Amharic: ሙላቱ አስታጥቄ) is an Ethiopian musician and arranger. He is known as the father of Ethio-jazz. Born in the western Ethiopian city of Jimma, Mulatu was musically trained in London, New York City, and Boston, where he was the first African student at Berklee College of Music. Later he combined his jazz and Latin music influences with traditional Ethiopian music.
He has worked with many influential jazz artists, such as Duke Ellington during the 1970s. After meeting the Massachusetts-based Either/Orchestra in Addis Ababa in 2004, Mulatu began a collaboration with the band which continues today, the most recent performances being in Scandinavia in summer 2006 and London, New York, Germany, Holland, Glastonbury (UK), Dublin and Toronto in summer 2008. In the autumn of 2008, he collaborated with the London-based psyche-jazz collective the Heliocentrics on the album Inspiration Information Vol. 3, which included re-workings of his earlier Ethio-jazz classics with new material by the Heliocentrics and himself. Mulatu’s signature instrument is the vibraphone.
In 2005, his music appeared on the soundtrack to the Jim Jarmusch film Broken Flowers. In addition, Volume 4 of the Ethiopiques series is devoted entirely to Mulatu’s music. Mulatu has also produced songs for many artists from East Africa, including Mahmoud Ahmed.
Mulatu released a two-disc set to be sold exclusively to passengers of Ethiopian Airlines, with the first disc being a compilation of the different styles from different regions of Ethiopia and the second being studio originals.
In 2007 and 2008, Mulatu completed a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard University where he worked on modernizations of traditional Ethiopian instruments and premiered a portion of a new opera, “The Yared Opera.”1 Mulatu also recently served as an Abramowitz Artist-in-Residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. In addition to a lecture and workshops, Mulatu served as an advisor to the MIT Media Lab on creating a modern version of the krar, a traditional Ethiopian instrument, for which he will return to MIT briefly in spring 2009 to check on its progress.2
On February 1, 2009, Mulatu Astatke performed at the Luckman Auditorium in Los Angeles with a band including such notable jazz musicians as Bennie Maupin, Azar Lawrence, and Phil Ranelin.
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Meklit Hadero Performs at the “Center of Culture”
At the age of 12, the Ethiopian-born Meklit Hadero left Brooklyn and called several cities home before settling in San Francisco. Now, after the release of her debut album ‘On A Day Like This’ in April, Meklit will be taking center stage in New York for the first time.
This past Friday Meklit performed to a sold out crowd at Bernos’ 4th Anniversary Celebration in Washington D.C. and on Tuesday, June 1st, New Yorkers will get a chance to see what the buzz is all about. Meklit will be performing at (Le) Poisson Rouge, a state-of-the art performance venue located in Greenwich Village and she is “really, really excited” about the performance. She describes New York-one of her 12 hometowns-as the “Center of Culture.” In addition to touring the United States and Europe, for the remainder of the year, Meklit will also be performing in Ethiopia this December.
Live performances in one of Meklit’s hometowns are extra special for her because “it gives me an opportunity to meet up with old friends.”
