Mulatu Astatke struggled for decades before his name became associated worldwide with a musical genre and he was finally born as the father of Ethio-jazz.
Now despite that long journey and his 81 years of age, the Ethiopian music legend cannot even “think about retirement”.
A one-man band, equally at home with the vibraphone and the conga, a Cuban drum, he created a unique musical blend in the 1960s, a mix of traditional Ethiopian music, funk brass, Afro-beat, and Latin jazz.
“Ethio-jazz is a musical genre which puts the whole world together and makes them one,” the octogenarian with a salt-and-pepper moustache told AFP in a recent interview.
The masenqo, a traditional Ethiopian single-stringed instrument played with a bow, features alongside the guitar and the trumpet in his performances.
“This is what I want to do, bring the world together around music,” said the composer and trained percussionist in a low voice inside his jazz club African Jazz Village, where he still performs near Addis Ababa’s famous Meskel Square.
His music is intended to pay homage to those he calls the “bush people”, the rural Ethiopian populations whose dance and music have had a considerable influence on his work and who, according to him, are “not recognized enough”.
“The people who invented the masenqo, those who invented the krar (an Ethiopian stringed instrument similar to the lyre), they are the ones who invented Mulatu,” he said.
“Tezeta” — “nostalgia” in Amharic, the Ethiopian national language — is one of the composer’s best-known songs, a sensual and catchy ballad where the saxophone and piano echo each other. But in Mulatu’s life, there is no nostalgia.
Crossing the wilderness
Mulatu Astatke was born in 1943 in Jimma, about 350 kilometers southwest of the capital Addis Ababa. As a teenager, his parents sent him to study in Britain.
“In high school, all I wanted to be was an engineer or a pilot,” he said, smiling.
But the drama and music classes he received led him to change his path.
In the late 1950s, he enrolled at Trinity College of Music in London to study clarinet and composition. He then headed to New York and Boston, where he became the first African student to attend the Berkeley College of Music.
Mulatu, who immediately declared that he did not want to “talk politics” in the interview, returned to Ethiopia to participate in the vibrant Addis Ababa music scene at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. He would become one of the central figures of “swinging Addis”.
But the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie and the rise to power of the military-Marxist Derg regime in 1974 changed the situation. Western music and culture were censored.
It was a journey through the wilderness for Mulatu, who claims to have “struggled” during this period as a music teacher. Recognition and success came in 1998 with the release of the “Ethiopiques” collection, which reissued the musical gems of Swinging Addis. Album number four is dedicated to Mulatu.
His career then took a spectacular leap in 2005 thanks to the film “Broken Flowers” by American director Jim Jarmusch, which featured four of his compositions on its soundtrack.
With this late-arriving international recognition, Mulatu has no plans to “retire,” unlike Mahmoud Ahmed, another Ethio-jazz legend, who gave his final concert in January.
Mulatu is returning from a tour of the United States and will perform in September at the Salle Pleyel in Paris.
“I have an album which will be released this year. It is called Mulatu plays Mulatu,” he said with a big smile.
“But 40, 50 years I’ve been struggling. It took me 40 years to reach world recognition — I am not going to stop now.”
