The Festival of a Thousand Stars Arba Minch 2005 (March Haire Music, 2006)
More than 500 performers traveled into the desert to Arba Minch in southern Ethiopia for a festival of traditional music and dance known as The Festival of a Thousand Stars. With a crowd of more than 15,000, the average music lover could wander among some of the most extravagant costumes and experience the songs and dances that celebrate birth and death, marriage and everyday life.
Spanning the traditional spectrum from the Gedeo of the African Rift to the Aari of South Omo to the Mursi between the Mago and Omo rivers to the D’irashe from the Gardula Mountains and many others, The Festival of a Thousand Stars is a song tribute to the spiritual journeys of Ethiopia’s peoples as they come together to shape a musical landscape as rich as the earth from which they spring.
The festival and CD with included video, recorded by Global Music Exchange and sponsored by the Christensen Fund and the Department of Culture of the Southern region of Ethiopia, promises to keep alive the traditions of these cultures in an ever-changing world.
Buy the CD The Festival of a Thousand Stars Arba Minch 2005.
More information at: www.1000starsfest.com.
Author: TJ Nelson
TJ Nelson is a regular CD reviewer and editor at World Music Central. She is also a fiction writer. Check out her latest book, Chasing Athena’s Shadow.
Set in Pineboro, North Carolina, Chasing Athena’s Shadow follows the adventures of Grace, an adult literacy teacher, as she seeks to solve a long forgotten family mystery. Her charmingly dysfunctional family is of little help in her quest. Along with her best friends, an attractive Mexican teacher and an amiable gay chef, Grace must find the one fading memory that holds the key to why Grace’s great-grandmother, Athena, shot her husband on the courthouse steps in 1931.
Traversing the line between the Old South and New South, Grace will have to dig into the past to uncover Athena’s true crime.
