Ethio Jazz

This ambitious project initiated with a reflection on exile and refugees and resulted in an original musical creation bringing together 12 artists - Arat Kilo, Mamani Keita, Ruşan Filiztek, Aida Nosrat, etc. - to create a repertoire of 14 songs, with influences from ethio-jazz, Afghan, Malian and Persian music. A clever mix of cultures, languages, and musicalities where emotion is the anchor.

Strut present the definitive official reissue of this landmark album in the field of African music originally released in 1972. Recorded in New York, Mulatu of Ethiopia arrived at a time when Astatke had begun to master the delicate fusion of styles needed to create Ethio jazz. The album represents the first fully formed document of his trademark sound. It features ‘Kulunmanqueleshi’, ‘Dewel’, and ‘Kasalefku-Hulu’, tracks that Mulatu would return to regularly on singles and in live shows, the Ethio-Latin workout ‘Chifara’ and the self-titled groover ‘Mulatu’: “I wanted to make a track for myself!”

The sweat of the rainforest, the hostility of the mangrove did not suit him in the end. So he left his natural environment for the tranquility of a freshwater lake. Without the constant need to battle to assert its territory, the Tiger found there the ideal place for its instrumental stories. To tell the story of those journeys that took him from Asia to Africa, from soul jazz salons to the concrete streets of hip hop, and transformed his stripes into music sheets where Thai ranges and ethio-jazz arrangements were registered.

In 2016, California-based tenor saxophonist Idris Ackamoor relaunched his 1970s spiritual-jazz band, The Pyramids, and released a corking new album, We Be All Africans (Strut Records). In spring 2018, he has released another outstanding disc with another almost entirely new line-up. The only musician who is held over from We Be All Africans is violinist Sandra Poindexter, who has replaced Ackamoor's 1970s frontline foil, flautist Margo Simmons. Poindexter's gritty playing, which harks back to the pioneering work of Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians violinist Leroy Jenkins, makes for a perfect fit with Ackamoor's broken-notes and vocalisations.