Anbessa Orchestra is a seven-piece Brooklyn band that plays Ethiopian music, and almost nobody in it is Ethiopian. Its founder, the Israeli guitarist Nadav Peled, moved back to New York in 2012 after a stretch at home in Israel and set out to build something around a repertoire he had fallen for there. "I just called some of my best friends who are also incredible musicians," he told Blue-in-Green:RADIO in 2020. "Most of the guys I knew from Israel and or got together kind of on the NY scene." That is the band's whole origin story, and it explains its composition: six of the seven chairs across its history have been filled by Israeli or American players who came out of New York jazz rooms, not out of the Ethiopian diaspora.

Peled had the jazz credentials to make those calls. He picked up the guitar at 11, switched to electric at 14, recorded a progressive-rock album at 17, and played the Barby, Israel's largest rock venue, before deciding at 19 that jazz was the main interest. A scholarship took him to the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York, where he studied with Junior Mance, Peter Bernstein, Charli Persip and Jack Wilkins and worked the Sweet Rhythm and Fat Cat rooms. Back in Israel during a break he won the America-Israel Cultural Foundation's Excellence in Jazz Guitar award, played with Yuval Cohen of the 3 Cohens and with saxophonist Erez Barnoy, toured with the reggae group Zvuloon Dub System, and served as musical arranger for Beit Avi Chai's Sigd program, a celebration of Ethiopian Jewish music and culture commissioned by the Jerusalem Municipality. That last credit is where the Ethiopian thread starts.

The band's first name was LIONS, which is what "anbessa" means in Amharic. Under that name it played New York clubs and cut a self-titled six-track EP at Excello Studios in November and December 2014, released February 5, 2015. The personnel on it is the classic lineup: Wayne Tucker on trumpet, Eyal Vilner on alto, Eden Bareket on baritone, Peled on guitar and writing everything that was not a cover, Dor Heled on keyboards, Tamir Shmerling on bass and Eran Fink on drums. Ariel Shafir recorded and mixed it and co-produced with Peled; Steve Fallone mastered. Half the record is Ethiopian standards ("Aynotche Terabu," "Yematibela Wef," "Zelel Zelel") and half is Peled originals, including the track "LIONS," which the German label Trikont picked up for its 2016 compilation Beyond Addis Volume 2: Modern Ethiopian Dance Grooves Inspired By Swinging Addis (US-0477), placing the band alongside Akalé Wubé, Jungle By Night and The Sorcerers on the international Ethio-groove circuit.

By mid-2016 the group had the Anbessa Orchestra name and a foothold. It held down annual New Year's Eve shows at Barbès in Park Slope, and on July 1, 2016 it opened for the Ethiopian keyboardist and composer Hailu Mergia at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, a booking WNYC flagged in its Gig Alert series that day. New York Music Daily reviewed a Barbès set from that spring and got at what makes the band work live: "the horns are tight and so is the rhythm section, and when somebody takes off on a solo, they make it count."

The second record, Negestat ("Kings"), arrived March 30, 2018, self-released on an all-analog vinyl LP recorded with Shafir at Dreamland Recording Studios. It is the band's most ambitious writing: seven tracks, all Peled originals, each built from a specific piece of Ethiopian musical material. "Gurage," premiered by PopMatters on March 2, 2018, is his take on the Gurage people's traditional beat and a nod to the singer Mahmoud Ahmed. "Gize Suite" adapts a krar part from Misrak Mammo's "Gizie Biyasayegnem" for the horn section. "Get'err" ("Village") came from Peled working out how to make an electric guitar sound like a krar, the five-string Ethiopian lyre. "Yeleleu Hager Lidj" ("Son of No Country") is about the refugee crisis. The vinyl sold out. Later that year the band turned up in an unexpected place: United Airlines commissioned four acts around the world to rework Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" for its Rhapsody Remastered project, and Anbessa's version, cut at Billy Aukstik's Hive Mind Recording in Brooklyn, was released October 31, 2018.

After Negestat the band worked in singles and swapped its bass chair, with Ran Livneh replacing Shmerling. "Tch'elema" ("Darkness," October 21, 2019) was written on the Ethiopian Antchi Hoye scale, which Peled chose deliberately: it has a harsh timbre but is used for joyous occasions, so the tune could be angry about "governmental chaos, climate change, refugees crises" and still point at a brighter future. PopMatters premiered it. "Werik'i" ("Gold," February 10, 2020) is its opposite, a three-bar-cycle ballad led by Vilner's flute; Afropop Worldwide, which had already called the band "one of the top Ethio-jazz outfits stateside," posted it on February 4, 2020. Both were recorded and mixed by Aukstik at Hive Mind and mastered by Alex Abrash. The pandemic then produced two more releases. On June 5, 2020 the band put out a full concert recorded at New City Brewery in Easthampton, Massachusetts on November 22, 2019, with all proceeds donated to Black Lives Matter; that set has a substitute front line, with Aukstik himself on trumpet, Bill Todd on alto and flute and Micha Gilad on keys, and Bareket the only horn player from the studio band still in his chair. "Gobez" ("Brave," April 15, 2021) was written and tracked remotely during quarantine as a tribute to healthcare workers, which is why the sleeve carries a lioness.

The band kept touring after that, adding the Ethiopian-Israeli singer Gili Yalo as a guest on dates including a Next Stage Arts show at Cooper Field in Putney, Vermont on August 8, 2021, its Vermont debut. Peled told the Brattleboro Reformer that week that a new album with expanded instrumentation, synthesizers and guest vocalists was due by the end of the year. It has not appeared: the last commercially released Anbessa Orchestra recording found is "Gobez." Peled has since relocated to Los Angeles, where he leads his own trio, and describes Anbessa Orchestra on his own site as "dedicated to combining elements of Ethiopian music with a dose of American jazz."

The band's method is to take a specific piece of Ethiopian musical vocabulary and give it to a New York horn section. Peled writes from the scales first: the pentatonic modes that carry fixed emotional associations in Ethiopian practice (tizita for nostalgia, Antchi Hoye for celebration despite its sharp sound), the 6/8 pulses, the odd phrase lengths, and the sound of the krar transposed onto an electric guitar with a surf-adjacent attack. Over that sit two saxophones and a trumpet playing lines closer to a soul-revue front line than to a big band, and a rhythm section that plays for dancers. The productions are analog by policy, tracked and usually mixed to tape, on the argument that the music simply sounds better that way and that tape forces complete takes instead of edits. Peled names his sources plainly: Mahmoud Ahmed, Hailu Mergia, Tilahoun Gessesse and Mulatu Astatke, the man who coined Ethio-jazz in the first place, alongside two American ones, the Budos Band and Charles Bradley; his own guitar bio adds Fela Kuti, Ali Farka Touré and Charlie Parker. The jazz element is not stylistic pastiche but structural: charts with real solo space, a band of players who hold separate jazz careers, and horn writing by a New School graduate. PopMatters, which premiered two of the singles, settled on "No one does Ethio-Jazz quite like Anbessa Orchestra."