He’s using a lazy Elvis-swing that goes back and forth, swiveling its hips. The man comes into this album with a shiver and a stammer. The way he uses his voice sometimes suggests that Elvis would have sounded better in Amharic.
Among his influences, he says, were Pat Boone, Elvis Presley, Nat King Cole, and Little Richard. Éthiopiques 22 covers his career between 19. His songs have been scattered across Éthiopiques 3, 8, 10, and 13. In 2001, Buda made him the subject of Éthiopiques 9. Observe his Afro quiff and come-get-me moustache.”Įshèté is in his 60s now and still performing. Is he starving? No he is the low sleek sneak of sex snaking towards you. It is the natural lot of an Ethiopian to be very cool, play the saxophone, and sing about people of the opposite sex whose “beauty has impassioned me.” “Here we are really”, it says. It was as if it was the natural lot of an Ethiopian to starve and suffer, as it seems to be the natural lot of people in other parts of the word to suffer annual flooding, cyclones, or fire. Starvation and war was the idea we’d been given of Ethiopia.
ETHIOPIAN OLD MUSIC ALEMAYEHU ESHETE SERIES
So when Francis Falceto began to compile the Éthiopiques series in 1997, re-releasing songs that had been recorded during the 1960s and ’70s, it was as if this music had sprung like flowers from a blighted moonscape. Ethiopia didn’t even have apartheid to act as a flashpoint, drawing international interest. The language didn’t sound familiar and its alphabet looked unbelievably strange. There was no breakthrough act, no Fela, no King Sunny Adé. The country didn’t have the outside connections or the relatively rich labels of South Africa. When the songs of some African countries filtered through to an English-speaking audience, Ethiopia’s music was not there with the rest. People stayed indoors, afraid, and the capital’s live music scene was stifled.
Then in 1974 a military junta overthrew Selassie and the brilliant nightlife of Addis Ababa went dark. The Ethiopian singer Alèmayèhu Eshèté had his first hit in the 1960s during the reign of the emperor Haile Selassie, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah.
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