Ethiopia is located in Eastern Africa, bordering Sudan, Eritrea, Jibuti, Somalia, Kenya, and South Sudan.
The Amharic language is the official language of the Republic of Ethiopia. It is also spoken in Eritrea. The Amharic language is popular with many reggae musicians, who are Rastafarians. They learn Amharic because they consider it to be a sacred language. Musicians like Lincoln Thompson and Misty in Roots have written songs in Amharic.
The roots of Ethiopia’s jazz tradition can be traced back to the 1950s with Nerses Nalbandian. When tasked to compose music for Ethiopia’s National Opera Theatre, Nerses Nalbandian had to figure out how to harmonize local sounds in big band arrangements without destroying the music’s authenticity. Ingeniously, Nalbandian set about solving this complex task, given Ethiopian music’s unique scales, by borrowing from Western instrumentation.
Mulatu Astatke later expanded upon these developments by combining the unusual pentatonic scale-based melodies of traditional Ethiopian music with the 12-note harmonies and instrumentation of Western music. Mulatu Astatke gave birth to Ethio-Jazz or Ethiojazz, a fascinating combination of modal melodies and diminished harmonies with a funk six-beat groove. Indeed, Ethiojazz was a quirky Ethiopian interpretation of funk, soul, jazz, and rock.
In the early 1970s, Ethiopia experienced a golden age of popular music with the rise of Ethio-jazz At the center of the scene was vocalist Mahmoud Ahmed. His 1975 album Erè Mèla Mèla is a classic album from the golden age of Ethiopian music, and was the first East African release from that era to be embraced by a wide-ranging Western audience. In the late 1990s, dozens of Ahmed’s recordings were reissued on the popular Éthiopiques compilations put together by French label Buda Musique.
Dark Days, Golden Years: Politics And Popular Music In Ethiopia
The revolution that toppled Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 and the Derg’s execution of him the following year marked a decisive break in Ethiopian history. Political violence, forced collectivization, and the Red Terror scattered communities across the world in a wave of emigration. Nevertheless, inside Addis Ababa’s hotels and nightclubs, a different story unfolded: under dictatorship, Ethiopian popular music entered one of its most inventive periods.
Proclamation No. 1 announced the end of the imperial order and the rise of the Provisional Military Administrative Council. Once Mengistu Haile Mariam consolidated power, the state reorganized culture along hardline socialist lines. Western records were banned, imports of equipment were heavily restricted, and lyrics were searched for ideological deviation. Music circulated within a tightly policed public sphere in which every stage, radio program, and cassette potentially served the revolution. Artists worked with the knowledge that colleagues could be imprisoned or worse.
The regime’s isolationist policy unintentionally redirected musical attention inward. Addis Ababa, previously a cosmopolitan crossroads, turned toward its own traditions. Hotel bands in venues like the Ghion, Hilton, and other urban enclaves still played six or seven nights a week, often multiple sets each evening. That relentless schedule produced what musicians later described as a “night school”: an intensive, practical conservatory in which players learned harmony, timing, and ensemble discipline in real time. Repetition became a laboratory for new ideas.
Censorship altered the balance between voice and instrument. Since lyrics invited scrutiny, instrumental pieces offered comparatively safer ground. Bands extended introductions, interludes, and solos until they became complete compositions. Horn sections navigated along modal lines; organs and electric guitars traced patterns built on Ethiopian systems such as tizita, bati, and anchihoye; rhythm sections experimented with asymmetrical dance grooves derived from regional folk repertoires. The band itself became the protagonist. Audiences learned to listen for individual phrasing, subtle shifts in rhythm guitar, or the way a horn player would stretch a single note across the bar line. Requests for singers frequently gave way to applause for another instrumental excursion.
Material scarcity was constant. Electric guitars, organs, and drum kits arrived irregularly and often secondhand. Musicians repaired amplifiers repeatedly, rewired pickups, and modified instruments with whatever parts could be found. Kagnew Station in Asmara, formerly a conduit for records, radios, and gear via the US military presence, closed in 1977, severing one of the last reliable channels for new technology. That enforced economy kept ensembles small and encouraged tight arrangements. Technical limitation did not suppress creativity; it redirected it.
Neighborhoods such as Soul Side and the Dahlak operated as semi-clandestine conservatories and social clubs. Musicians rehearsed in cramped back rooms, exchanged ideas after hotel gigs, and moved between church choirs, school bands, and wedding ensembles. Many players first encountered music in liturgical settings or village festivities, then translated those rhythmic patterns and scales into an urban, electrified idiom. Bands rarely formed through formal auditions; they emerged from overlapping networks of kinship, friendship, and shared survival under state surveillance.
Culturally, the period can be read as a negotiation between deep historical continuities and a modern, urban sensibility. Traditional vocal genres, azmari song, church chant, regional wedding repertoires, provided melodic and rhythmic frameworks. Hotel stages and state-controlled media imposed new conditions: amplification, regular salaries, fixed performance slots for dancing audiences, and strict ideological oversight. Within that matrix, Ethiopian popular music developed a distinct language that belongs neither fully to Western pop nor to older rural traditions, though it remains recognizably rooted in both. The result sits comfortably within the wider field of world music while retaining a strong local identity.
The paradox of the era is that an authoritarian state, intent on control, inadvertently presided over one of the golden moments of Ethiopian popular music.
Ethiopian Musicians
Gigi, Girma Beyene, Mahmoud Ahmed, Minase Hailu, Mulatu Astatke, Neway Debebe, Roha Band, Saliha Sami, Seleshe Damessae (a.k.a. Sileshi Demissie, Seleshe Demassae).
