Today is Meskerem 1 — New Year’s Day in Ethiopia and Eritrea. It is a date our own calendar can’t hold: while we are still in September, Addis Ababa has just come out of the long rains, and the hillsides around the capital have turned yellow with adey abeba, the daisy that tells everyone the year has turned. The holiday is called Enkutatash — the gift of jewels. It goes back to the Queen of Sheba, and it is celebrated the way every good new year is: bonfires the night before, white clothes in the morning, and coffee roasted and poured by the potful while the whole street greets each other.
So this week’s set comes from Addis Ababa — specifically from “Swinging Addis”, the golden age between roughly the late 1960s and 1978, when a handful of bands in one city invented something that has no real equivalent anywhere else. They took Ethiopia’s ancient pentatonic modes and ran them through horn sections, Hammond organs, vibraphones, wah-wah guitars and a rhythm section that swung like a door off its hinges. It is jazz, it is funk, it is soul — and it is unmistakably Ethiopian, because the melody always goes where the church, not the chord chart, says it should go.
What made it possible was a collision. Mulatu Astatke went to Boston to study jazz and came home with Latin percussion and vibes; the Walias Band became the house band of a kingdom that had three decades left to run; Amha Records pressed 45s by the thousand and independent labels followed. And then the Imperial era ended in 1974, censorship arrived, the bands scattered — and for a generation this music existed mostly as battered vinyl in family cupboards. It was saved by obsessives: Francis Falceto’s Éthiopiques series on Buda Musique in the 1990s, and since then Habibi Funk, Now-Again, Awesome Tapes From Africa and Mississippi Records, each of whom has pulled another sleeve out of another cupboard.
Tonight’s twelve come from that whole arc — the 45s, the cassette era, the exile and the revival — because a new year is a good excuse to listen to a city that was once the most exciting place on earth to make a record. File it under: horns up, lights low, and a country seven years behind us that has decided it is ahead.
1. Bahta Gebre-Heywet — Tessassategn Eko
Opening with brass, as any New Year should be opened. Bahta Gebre-Heywet was one of the voices of the Amha Records years, and this early-’70s rollercoaster gives him a horn line that arrives like a taxi you didn’t order — all confidence, all forward motion, the whole band leaning into the corner together.
2. Alemayehu Eshete — Addis Ababa Bete
They called him the Ethiopian Elvis, and he spent five decades earning it. “Addis Ababa Bete” is a love letter to his own city: a rolling bass, a wah-wah guitar that keeps looking over its shoulder, and a man singing the name of the place he lives as if he’d just noticed how beautiful it was.
3. Ayalew Mesfin — Hasabe
Funk with sand in it. Ayalew Mesfin cut fierce, wiry singles in the mid-’70s and then quietly disappeared from the record — literally: the tapes and 45s sat in storage until Now-Again reissued them decades later. “Hasabe” means “my worries”, and you can hear every one of them in the guitar.
4. Tilahun Gessesse — Lantchi Biye
Ethiopians call him simply The Voice. Tilahun Gessesse was the first singer to be a star nationwide rather than regionally, and this early-’70s ballad — arranged by Mulatu Astatke, whose horn charts seem to stand slightly behind the singer — is the sound of a tenor carrying a whole country’s feelings up a long hill without ever once losing its breath.
5. Mahmoud Ahmed — Bemen Sebeb Letlash
From Erè Mèla Mèla, the mid-’70s record that finally reached Western ears years after it was made and turned Mahmoud Ahmed into the gateway drug for the entire scene. Hear how the voice rises, holds, and falls again — like the Entoto hills above the city.
6. Mulatu Astatke — Yèkèrmo Sèw
The cornerstone. Mulatu Astatke is the man who named Ethio-jazz, and “Yèkèrmo Sèw” — “a man of experience and wisdom” — is built on a phrase he carried home from a Horace Silver record and then bent into an Ethiopian mode until it belongs to nobody else. Congas, vibes, and a melody that walks rather than runs.
7. Hailu Mergia & The Walias Band — Musicawi Silt
If the set has a dance floor, it is here. Recorded in 1977 by the band that backed everyone in Addis, “Musicawi Silt” became close to a national standard on the strength of that organ figure alone — so good that Antibalas, Akalé Wubé and a dozen others have since tried it on. Hailu Mergia later drove a taxi in Washington, D.C., for twenty years before a collector’s phone call brought him back to the stage.
8. Bezunesh Bekele — Aha Gedawo
One of the great female voices of Swinging Addis, and a reminder that the scene was never only a boys’ club. Bezunesh Bekele’s 1972 recording is loose, wry and completely unhurried, and it resurfaced recently on Habibi Funk’s Taitu collection of Ethiopian stompers — one of the best finds of the last decade.
9. Tsehaytu Beraki — Mejemerya Fqri
Across the border in Eritrea, Tsehaytu Beraki sang and played the krar — and paid for it, carrying shrapnel in her head from the independence war. She ended up in Rotterdam, where Terp Records built her a new instrument, sat her down for three years of sessions and released Selam in 2004. “Mejemerya Fqri” is “the first love”, and it was heard on Late Junction in 2007. Some voices arrive in the room before the singer does.
10. Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou — The Homeless Wanderer
And now the lights go down. Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou (1923–2023) was a nun and a pianist who wrote her own music at a convent piano — Ethiopian hymn lines and something close to French impressionism, played with a hesitancy that sounds like thought. “The Homeless Wanderer” is exactly what the title promises, and it is one of the most quietly devastating four minutes in the whole African catalogue.
11. Aster Aweke — Yedi Gosh
The diaspora chapter. Aster Aweke left Addis for Washington, D.C. in 1981 and became the most famous Ethiopian singer outside Ethiopia — a voice big enough to fill stadiums in Addis and Arabic-scale ballads in a Maryland studio. “Yedi Gosh” comes from Kabu (1991), and it is soul singing in a language that was never meant to be sung this way.
12. Gigi — Guramayle
Closing with the modern turn. Ejigayehu Shibabaw’s 2001 debut — produced by Bill Laswell, no less — put Ethiopian melodies on top of a low, dub-heavy pulse and made everyone realise the old modes could go anywhere. “Guramayle” is the sound of Addis leaving the mountain and heading for the harbour.
That’s the crate for this week. Twelve records from one city and its diaspora, most of them older than most of the people who will hear them first, all of them still moving. It’s on the Handpicked by Fiona playlist on YouTube Music — and on the shelf at home, where it will play exactly as well on a wet, offline Tuesday as it does tonight. Enkutatash, Addis. Happy new year.
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