Éthiopiques 30: Mistakes on Purpose
Buda Musique (67 mins)
For the better part of 20 years, Buda Musique’s Éthiopiques has been the go-to series for Ethiojazz and traditional music from Ethiopia. You won’t find that here. Éthiopiques 30 covers a wide range of styles, from cheesy country ballads to slinky rock, from smooth and groovy soul to hard funk (and, okay, maybe a little bit of jazz) – all dripping in that classic Ethiopian sound.
Crooner Girma Bèyènè was a star in the ‘Swinging Addis’ period of the 1970s, but recorded very little of his own music – it was his compositions and arrangements that gained more notoriety. After being off-the-radar in the US for 25 years, he slowly made his way back onto the Addis music scene, and in 2015 was invited to play a concert with French collective Akalé Wubé – it was obvious then that a recording was necessary. With artistic direction from Éthiopiques curator Francis Falceto, Bèyènè and Akalé Wubé have recreated and reimagined the songs from the singer’s golden era, along with one Akalé Wubé original, the instrumental ‘For Amha’.
From Bèyènè’s age-worn voice and evocative spoken-word passages adding extra emotional dimensions to his classics to Akalé Wubé’s sometimes-sleek, sometimes-raucous arrangements, there’s only one term for it: this album is immaculately cool.