Abate Berihun was born in 1967 in Addis Ababa, growing up next to a music school and a military band and absorbing Charlie Parker recordings early. He joined the Ethiopian military band at sixteen, touring Ethiopia and the Eastern Bloc — including, under the Mengistu government's orders, a trip to North Korea for Kim Il-sung's birthday. During the unrest that toppled Mengistu, EPRDF forces ambushed the band's tour bus; most of the musicians on it were killed, and Berihun, shot twice, survived. He spent the following eight years playing nightly at Addis Ababa's Hilton and Sheraton hotels and at the Ethiopian National Theatre, touring with singer Mahmoud Ahmed, and by twenty-one led his own band on European tours.

He arrived in Israel in late 1999 to join family already there, and the early years were hard: he worked as a dishwasher by day and a night security guard, and the chemicals from restaurant dish soap damaged his fingertips, impairing his ability to play. He was supported by Moshe Bar-Yuda, a veteran of Israel's early outreach to Beta Israel communities, who secured funding for him to leave the restaurant work and introduced him to musicologist Shlomo Israeli, who in turn paired him with pianist Yitzhak Yedid. The two rehearsed only twice before recording as the duo Ras Dashen, named for Ethiopia's highest mountain, building the music on four Ethiopian qenet modes — Anchi Hoye, Bati, Tezeta and Ambassel. The duo's first album is dated inconsistently across sources — Wikipedia gives a 2002 recording and 2004 release, while Yedid's own CV specifies a January 2004 recording released in 2006 on MCI, and a contemporaneous AllAboutJazz review treats it as a 2006 release — but every account agrees the project premiered live in Tel Aviv in September 2001. A second Ras Dashen album, V'ahavta, followed on May 21, 2021, recorded in Brisbane and co-produced with Kim Cunio.

In Israel he also co-founded the band Kuluma in December 2003 (with trumpeter Itamar Borochov among others), released the album Mother Tongue in December 2005, and led the Tezeta ensemble, built around Ethiopian Jewish liturgical chant. He composed and arranged the title track of singer Ariel Zilber's 2005 album Anabel, and appeared at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival in May 2007 alongside pianist Aaron Choulai. His current group, Abate Berihun & The Addis Ken Project — with pianist Roy Mor, bassist David Michaeli and drummer Nitzan Birnbaum — formed in 2018 and released the album Addis Ken on the American label Origin Records, recorded in Gothenburg and Tel Aviv and mixed and mastered in New York. He remains active: he performed at Jerusalem's Hullegeb Israel-Ethiopian Arts Festival in September 2025 alongside Yair Dalal and bassist Yossi Fine, and the Addis Ken Project has a European tour booked for autumn 2026, including a release show in Budapest.

Berihun's playing sits at the point where Ethiopian modal material — the qenet scales that structure both Ras Dashen and much of his other work — meets a tenor style an AllAboutJazz review described as referencing "both Pres and Trane," Lester Young's lightness against John Coltrane's harmonic reach. That duality traces directly to his two educations: eight years of hotel-band and touring work in Addis Ababa before he ever left Ethiopia, and a jazz vocabulary absorbed from Charlie Parker records as a child. The Ras Dashen project with Yitzhak Yedid is the clearest single statement of his approach — Ethiopian liturgical and modal material reworked as small-group jazz rather than performed as folkloric repertoire — and the same instinct carries through Kuluma, the Tezeta ensemble, and the more straight-ahead post-bop language of the Addis Ken Project's newer material.