Artist Bio:
The aim of the Ethiopiques series, directed by Françis Falceto, is to highlight two little known periods of Ethiopian modern music. The story is starting by a love affair between this man and the music of Amha Records, the main private label of Ethiopia in the '60s. This label and this treasure had been dislocated by the DERG dictatorial government. Since 1991 and its fall, there has been an Ethiopian music rebirth.
The main body of Ethiopian records was produced in less than one decade: all in all, just under 500 45s and around 30 LP albums. Ahma Eshèté, creator of the Amha Records label, was the driving force behind this brief creative burst and one of the main founders of a movement which swept the Ethiopian scene during the end of the rule of the Emperor Haile Sellassie. In six years (1969-1975), Ahma issued 103 two-title 45s and a dozen LPs, mostly containing pieces previously released as singles: in all, around 250 titles.
Records had of course been distributed in Ethiopia before this period. The first — going all the way back to 1908 — were recorded on the initiative of the Italian occupation (1935-1941). A total of 248 songs were recorded on the initiative of Italian researchers and Saleh Ahmed Kékiya, a wealthy Eritrean merchant living in Addis Ababa.
A few years after the liberation, an imperial decree (July 30, 1948) granted a monopoly over the production and records to Agher Feqer Mahber — "The Love of Country Association" — which was in fact the first Ethiopian National Theatre. Hence 78-rpm records celebrated Haile Sellasie's 1955 jubilee, followed by a few 45s in the mid 1960s. Until then, all these recordings were dedicated exclusively to traditional music.
Modern Ethiopian music, however had been emerging since the liberation, even though all cultural activities took place under government control, especially music, which had no other outlet than the bands of the Imperial Body Guard, the army, the police, the municipality or the Haile Sellassie I Theatre. Alongside these institutions' brass bands and other military music groups, jazz and light music ensembles began to spring up, led by foreign instructors like Austrian Franz Zelwecker and most notably Nersès Nalbandian, an Armenian living in Ethiopia since the 1930s, who became a key figure in modern Ethiopian music.
As in the rest of the world, for Ethiopia the '60s were the years of ultimate postwar modernity. They began in violence with the failed coup d'état of December 1960. The Imperial Body Guard, as well as many of the musicians who made up its band, were heavily implicated. After this warning shot had been sounded, the aging monarch compromised, displaying an increasingly progressive approach.
As the capital and only metropolis of a very centralized empire, soon to become the international showcase of non-alignment and of African unity, Addis Ababa distilled the very essence of modernist audacity. Music and its enjoyment were part and parcel of the spirit. Armenian merchant Garbis Haygazian had begun to import one of the emblems of modernity, the reel-to-reel tape recorder. He also struck upon the idea of recording the foremost official bands and their star vocalists and selling the tapes. At first a very private affair involving only the high nobility and Ethiopians of considerable wealth, these makeshift jukeboxes soon spread to the burgeoning bars and cabarets which drew members of all social classes. As everywhere, a flourishing nightlife marked this period of intense emancipation. Numerous hotels and nightclubs opened, showcasing their own bands, initially recruited from the official ensembles, landing many musicians in hot water, and went on to found the first independent bands, the logical result of so much rampant liberalization.
For once in tune with the world, swinging Addis sported the daring uniform of the period: wide leg or bell-bottom trousers, skinny ties, afro or beehive hairdos, miniskirts and even the pill. It was in this heady, end-of-empire context that Amha Eshèté, a modern and enterprising young man (he was 24 years old in 1969) very logically decided to start his own record company, and in so doing to defy the 1948 imperial edict.
Despite contentions by Captain Atman ** Mèkonnen, administrators of both the Haile Sellassie I Theater and Agher Feqer Mahber, of absolute control over all Ethiopian recording output and even importation of foreign records, this extravagantly absurd and anachronistic measure could not go on.
Throughout the year 1970, the national press reported the controversies and unrest sown in Ethiopian society by the younger generation. The emperor, who had the last word on everything, probably assessed the seriousness of the conflict and decided to let those determined youths have their way. All this healthy turmoil was brutally extinguished in 1974 by the fall of the emperor and the arrival of a particularly brutal military junta. The Golden Era's days were numbered, and the country would soon wake up to a new regime of repression. Curfews put an end to any nightlife. No one could have imagined that this would go on uninterrupted for 18 long years until the fall of the dictatorship. Like every sector of social life, Ethiopian music was almost totally extinguished. Record production plummeted, disappearing completely in 1978.
As in many domains, the fall of the dictatorship "The Derg" in May 1991 sounded the call for a great renewal in Ethiopian music . After 18 years of unremitting glaciation, the curfew was abolished in 1992. Once again Ethiopians could take back the night, nerve centre of musical life. And they didn't do things half way. The situation reversed immediately during the first heady month after the Derg's fall. Addis Ababa in particular was seized with entrepreneurial hysteria. The music merchants were no exception. A multitude of restaurants, nightclubs and hotels opened, all imitating Western-style fun to attract rich Ethiopians and Westerners.
But the most interesting phenomenon for fans of Ethiopian music remains the incredible flowering of azmaribéts. They sprang up by the dozens (hundreds?) throughout the capital, but centered in two areas: Kazentchis and Yohannès Sefer (also called "Datsun" Sefer because local bars owner were the first to swan about in Japanese cars). Simple bars or converted villa dinning rooms, dingy closets at the back of a courtyard or down a back alley, all you needed was 40 to 250 square feet, a few stools, a counter with whisky and beer, and one, two, six or seven musicians who took turns playing in, and there you had it.
