Ethiopian Jazz

Ethiopian Jazz, or Ethio-jazz, is a fusion genre that developed in Addis Ababa from the late 1950s and 1960s, combining traditional Ethiopian modal music with the instrumentation and harmony of jazz and funk. Its defining characteristic is the use of Ethiopia’s pentatonic qenet modes (among them tizita, ambassel, anchihoye and bati) over jazz arrangements built on brass, electric keyboards, vibraphone and a funk rhythm section producing melodic lines that sit outside the Western tonal system. It drew on two main sources: indigenous Ethiopian music, including the improvisational azmari minstrel tradition, and the American and European jazz and big-band records.

The vibraphonist and arranger Mulatu Astatke, who trained in London and New York, is its central figure and gave the vibraphone its signature role. Recording fell away sharply after the 1974 Derg coup. The music reached an international audience chiefly through the Éthiopiques reissue series on Buda Musique from the late 1990s, and through Jim Jarmusch’s 2005 film Broken Flowers, which used several Astatke pieces; it has since been widely sampled in hip-hop, including by Nas and Damian Marley and Madlib.