Ethiopian Jazz

hmmm.. you're kind of turning a thread about ethiopian music into a thread about afrobeat, which is a million miles (well over a thousand anyway) from the ethiopian stuff. the only thing that links it even vaguely is the syncopation that mulatu brought back from his travels with western big bands. for me the ethiopian stuff is all about the scale they employ as their natural starting point, as idiosyncatic to the country's music as the blues scale. Mulatu's a fantastic shoehorn into it but beyond the couple of proper albums he did in the early 70s which contain the dirty stuff with all the fat rhythm sections is a bunch of mindblowing artists whose recordings are far removed from Fela Kuti.

All that said I'm just geeking out; I'm massively into both afro beat and the stuff that Ethiopiques has, thankfully, gone to town on rereleasing. It's hard to imagine getting to hear a lot of that any other way. Broken Flowers was a necessarily annoying "late to the party" moment as a bunch of beats and breaks diggers had been on Mulatu for a good decade before that, but if it meant more people got into Mulatu's extraordinarily filthy grooves then there could have been worse springboards i guess. But beyond Mulatu, on the Ethiopiques label, is a ton of stuff that shares the same hypnotic scale and goes much further out from the music of our culture. I recommend Volume 7, Mahmoud Ahmed as a standout among literally days of listening.. I think it's at Volume 25 or something now. Wicked stuff. I'd also say keep an eye out for Mulatu himself, he still plays in London. I saw him at Cargo about a year ago, with the Heliocentrics.. it was absolutely mindblowing.