Mulatu Astatke: New York-Addis-London - The Story of Ethio Jazz 1965-1975 (2LP) [STRUT]

Why you'll love it

This 2LP set gathers twenty tracks from Mulatu's New York and Addis Ababa years across four sides, mastered at Masterpiece in London. His music reached a wide new audience when Jim Jarmusch's film Broken Flowers featured seven of his songs.

This edition

• 2LP set
• Mastered at Masterpiece, London
• Pressed in Germany

About the album

Mulatu Astatke's family sent him to Wales in 1959 to study engineering. He came back with a music degree from London, a spell as Berklee's first African student and a vibraphone, which is the sort of career change parents rarely see coming.

This collection, compiled by Soundway's Miles Cleret, follows him from the Latin jazz he cut in New York in the mid-1960s to the Ethio-jazz he invented back home in Addis Ababa, mixing Ethiopian scales with jazz, funk and soul. "I Faram Gami I Faram" is sung in Spanish, "Yèkèrmo Sèw" reworks a Horace Silver tune, and "Yègelé Tezeta," "Yèkatit" and "Mulatu" lock vibes, organ and horns into deep, hypnotic grooves. Many of the Addis recordings first came out on Amha Records, the country's first independent label, and the 1990s Éthiopiques CD series later brought them to collectors around the world.

Nas, Kanye West and Madlib have all sampled his music, and he played Toronto with the Either/Orchestra in 2008. In 1973 he also played as a special guest with Duke Ellington's band on its tour of Ethiopia, and in later years he worked on a modern version of the krar, a traditional Ethiopian instrument, as an artist-in-residence at MIT.

Also at Kops: more Mulatu Astatke on vinyl · browse World

Tracklist

Listen

On Strut (cat# STRUT051LP), the 2009 compilation.