In an early scene in Jim Jarmusch's 2005 film "Broken Flowers," the hero (Bill Murray ) is sitting miserable in his living room and listening to gloomy classical music. His neighbor comes in and scolds him: What happened to the disc I burned for you? Why aren't you listening to it? The neighbor goes up to the disc library, finds the burned disc, puts it in the system and the classical gloom is replaced by hypnotic jazz funk, using clearly non-Western scales, which surely made fans of black music sit upright and ask: What is that fantastic music?
The great piece Bill Murray's neighbor picked is called "Yekermo Sew." When Jarmusch's film hit the screen, very few people knew about it or its creator, the wonderful Ethiopian musician, Mulatu Astatke. Six years later, thanks in part to Jarmusch's movie, "Yekermo Sew" is a familiar and beloved piece, and Astatke is one of the most well-regarded African musicians, someone sought after by every self-respecting festival. Today he arrives for a concert at the Barbie Club in Tel Aviv.
The visit is generating justified great excitement among fans of black and African music in Israel, like the ones who gathered last Tuesday in a Jaffa bar and drank and danced to a sound track of unadulterated jazz and groove from Ethiopia.
Ethiopian jazz; anyone who has not heard this wonder may think this is a surprising combination, but it is the perfect marriage - two completely different worlds of black music, which together form a third, inspiring in its beauty. It brings jazz back to its African roots, refreshes traditional Ethiopian music and does not sound like any other fusion of jazz and African music.
The link between jazz and African music existed before Astatke started out (jazz originated in Africa, whereas Ethiopian music has an age-old obsession with woodwinds ), but Astatke is the one who wove this common musical fabric in a most careful manner and also gave it the name Ethio-jazz. It happened thanks to his great talent and his life, which moves along an Addis Ababa, London, Boston, New York axis.
Astatke, 68, was born in the western Ethiopian city of Jimma to a well-to-do family and was sent in the late 1950s to study aeronautics in Wales. That at least was the plan he related five years ago in a Haaretz interview. "But the director of the school orchestra, where I played for fun, told me, 'It's possible that you'll be a good engineer, but your destiny is to be a musician.' "
Astatke says, "I think there's no difference between music and science. The musician combines notes in order to produce something interesting; the chemist combines chemicals to create something interesting. The success of both is determined by the relationships in the structure they create. In music they call it contrapuntal, in science it has another name, but it's exactly the same thing."
First African at BerkleeFrom Wales he went on to study classical music in London and when he decided to focus on jazz, he headed for Boston, where he was the first African to attend the prestigious Berklee College of Music. Later, in New York, together with Puerto Rican musicians, he formed the Ethiopian Quintet, in which he combined jazz, Latin music and Ethiopian music.
In the late 1960s, after a decade in the West, he decided to return to Ethiopia.
"I will always have respect for America, because it turned me into what I am," says Astatke. "But it was important to me to apply what I learned and what I invented in my country, to instill in Ethiopian music new perceptions of beat, counterpoint, orchestration, harmony."
Astatke's return to Ethiopia had great timing. In the late 1960s, there was a small musical renaissance underway in Ethiopia. Until that time, the government had a monopoly on music recording and distribution, and a musician who wanted to work in the field had one option: playing in a military band. But in 1969, when Haile Selassie's rule weakened, young entrepreneurs began recording and distributing music independently. Despite the regime's threat to jail them, no such steps were taken.
A vibrant music scene developed around them and Mulatu Astatke was its leader. In 1973, when Duke Ellington and his orchestra performed in Addis Ababa, Astatke played his music for the aging jazz giant. "I will never forget his reaction," he said with much emotion in the interview. "He listened attentively and said, 'Mulatu, your music has such a beautiful sound. I didn't expect that from an African. Nice work.'"
In the 1990s, the French music researcher Francis Falceto starting working on an amazing music project - the "Ethiopiques" album series, which sought to present the wonders of Ethiopian music to Western listeners and primarily the musical renaissance of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is a monumental series of 20 albums and the fourth album in the series featured Mulatu's fantastic music.
Mulatu is listed as the composer of all the pieces on "Ethiopiques 4." According to the Jerusalem saxophonist Nadav Haber, who specializes in Ethiopian music and plays Ethiopian-influenced jazz, they are essentially segments taken from traditional music that Astatke arranged in a modern style. "The disc even has a section of free jazz, which ostensibly doesn't have anything folk-traditional about it, but when I played it for a musician who emigrated from Ethiopia, he said he recognizes the traditional melody it is based on," says Haber. "That is not enough to detract from Mulatu's greatness. As an arranger he was a giant."
One of those who listened to the fourth album in the "Ethiopiques" series, where Astatke's music starred, was Jim Jarmusch. He liked what he heard so much that he decided to use Astatke's music in "Broken Flowers." He even told the New York Times that he created the character of the African neighbor just so there would be a dramatic basis for playing Astatke's music in the film.
Astatke's career was reinvigorated by "Broken Flowers" and two years ago he recorded a fine album together with an English group, the Heliocentrics. He is coming to Israel with an eight-person band. Fans of black music and anyone who has experienced the magic of Ethiopian music will not want to miss his performance.
