Ethio-Jazz

8 profiles tagged Ethio-Jazz, A-Z.

Ethio-jazz was developed in the late 1950s and 1960s by vibraphonist and percussionist Mulatu Astatke, who trained at Berklee College of Music in Boston and drew on earlier fusions of Ethiopian and Western music pioneered by Armenian-Ethiopian arranger Nerses Nalbandian. It is distinguished by combining the five-note pentatonic scales and modal melodies of traditional Amharic and Ethiopian church music with Western jazz harmony, instrumentation, and, often, Latin and funk-derived rhythm sections. Astatke, who brought the sound back to Addis Ababa around 1969, remains the genre's singular, defining figure.