ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia – In the stagnant Ethiopian musical scene, not many sparkling sounds are heard. In fact, with the exception of a handful of artists, lazy synthesizer sounds and poorly controlled voices are becoming the identity of modern Ethiopian music.

With just a few singers having the ability to produce both low and high pitch notes, it is very rare that good music appears. Yohanes Bekele, a.k.a. Tokichaw, is one young artist that seems like he has the ability to buck this trend.

The well received display he put on for Birhanu Tezera’s Yambule, is one recent example of his talent; and his recent single - the overnight hit Chambalala - highlights his skills more vividly than ever.

(Audio) LISTEN TO CHAMBALALA

The song is about the dawn of the New Year in the southern Ethiopian region of Sidama. Chambalala is chanting music that often leads to a rewards for the singers of Bure Samita – a special mixed meal of milk, Kocho (bread), and butter. But for this artist, the Chambalala culture has become his trademark and has given him more than a special meal for a day.

Tokichaw explains what Chambalala means to him: “When you go to a house the day after the Fiche (New Year) has been celebrated, you say Ayde Chambalala’, and the crowd in the house will welcome you saying, ’Adona Buro.’ Originally the chant has a slower rhythm, but I mixed it in a way that makes it a club song.”

For Tokichaw, the fun part of this song goes further than performing it: “Today, people ask me what Chambalala means, and I always explain; in the process I promote my beautiful culture.”

Tokichaw performed the song at this year’s New Year celebrations in Sidama. Its popularity was apparent due to the fact that he was asked to play it again three times for the different audiences he performed to. But for the Chambalala craving crowd, the three live renditions were not enough, and the song was played over the radio and in the clubs the whole day. In Awassa the crowd was also cheering for Tokichaw when he sung his smash hit.

The 27 year old had his first stage appearance with the hip hop group Messengers, who he started out with in 2000. When they disbanded after an unsuccessful album, Tokichaw - then Yohannes - came up with a new plan: giving himself his current stage name, he decided to pursue a distinct style of music.

After meeting the young music arranger, Hunante Mulu, who was working on his single Seleleta for the Lasta album, Tokichaw was recommended to feature in Birhanu’s Yambule. As Birhanu had decided to do the single without his long-time colleague, Tadele, the duo that comprised Lafontain, he was in for a challenge. But the featuring of the gifted young musician helped earn him popularity. After Tokichaw breathed life into Yambule, he got a lot of commendations, but it was his second public appearance that earned him the most respect.

Today, Chambalala has become one of the most requested songs in most of Addis’ clubs. Having performed at the Falcon five years ago and starting playing at Abu Dhabi the following year for six months, Tokichaw was honing his voice before he got his recording breaks: “I was encouraged to sing more by some club goers. That has made me want to do a song of my own. But I had to tune my voice,” he says.

A few years later, the live shows get an enthusiastic response from the audience: “It was a great boost for me to hear the crowd cheer out my name when it was announced that Yambule would be played. I had to think of something special to provide for this great people; I came with Seleleta and something of my own, Chambalala.”

Tokichaw’s collaborations are going to be released sooner than his full album, which will include more songs with distinct cultural touches. Among the songs that will hit the radio soon is a single he did with the young singer, Tamirat Desta, which is likely to be out in a couple of weeks. The song he did with Hailye Tadese and Abraham Gebremedhin is also set to be finished soon.

Currently, Tokichaw is preparing his own album, but he does not want to rush the work. “If it is God’s wish, I will prepare an album that will be a hit,” he says.

Among the other projects that Tokichaw is involved in is a musical production with German and Spanish musicians. However, his ultimate goal is to have an audience that transcends national boundaries: “I would really love it if I could at least go beyond our border and reach out to our neighbouring countries such as Kenya,” he reveals.

VENICE, Sept 2 (Reuters) - A powerful new film chronicles the life of an Ethiopian intellectual who flees his country during the Marxist “red terror” in the 1980s, only to be viciously attacked in Germany by racist youths.

Anberber, the central character, returns to his homeland longing for peace, but life with his mother in a small village is disrupted by armed factions dragging boys away to fight and by prying locals wary of a man they consider to be an outsider.

“Teza”, by Ethiopian director Haile Gerima, is one of 21 movies in competition at the Venice film festival, and warm applause after a press screening suggested it would be a contender for prizes at the closing ceremony on Saturday.

The story jumps between multiple timelines, but in each Anberber struggles to fit in, be it in his native Ethiopia or in exile in Germany.

Gerima said “Teza” reflected his own experiences, and was based on a recurring dream.

“The dream is basically about intellectual displacement,” he told reporters in Venice on Tuesday.

“When I translated my dream it was about being displaced, unable to live up to your peasant life, your peasant family and at the same time reconcile (that) with your modern world.”

Anberber seeks refuge in memories of his happy childhood, something U.S.-based Gerima said he also did whenever he returned to Ethiopia which he described as “a nightmare for me.”

“Like Anberber in the film I like to drown (in) the past.”

“I go to Ethiopia and I dream my past but the present is so powerful it continues to hijack my sentimental journey to my childhood. I think it’s the idea that you want your childhood world to come back, I think that is universal.”

“In Africa the luxury to remember memory is hijacked by daily violence, either silent violence or obvious violence.”

DEATH AND DANGER

Some of the most striking scenes are set in the 1980s, with Ethiopia in the grip of purges, show trials, executions and mob lynchings under the leadership of Mengistu Haile Mariam, who seized power in 1974 after Emperor Haile Selassie’s overthrow.

Giant portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin form the backdrop to the violence and fear, and Anberber’s revolutionary fervour quickly turns to disillusionment as he realises what the regime means for himself and his country.

Actor Abeye Tedla, who plays Anberber’s best friend and fellow idealist, recalled some of the horrors of that time which he lived through as a child.

“I’ve seen a few bodies when I was going to school and coming back. It wasn’t uncommon.”

“As you were walking by there would be a guard standing there so nobody removes the body. And if you look too closely … the person would say ‘Do you know this person?’ And I mean literally you could get shot if the person suspected you.”

He praised Gerima for what he said was a balanced portrayal of those times in Ethiopia.

buzznet - Natalie Portman’s, singer-songwriter boyfriend Devendra Banhart wears a black t-shirt with the Ethiopian alphabet on it. Earlier this month, he wore a scarf with the Biblical quote, “Everything happens through Him”, in Amharic (Ethiopia’s official language).

(Hollywood star and former Israeli to visit camp in Addis Ababa as part of struggle to obtain aliyah permits for thousands of Ethiopian Jews)

___________________________

Actress Natalie Portman has joined the fight for the Falash Mura aliyah. The people of the Falash Mura denomination, who practice the Jewish religion, have been awaiting permission to come to Israel while they stay in camps in the Ethiopian capital.

Portman, who was born in Jerusalem, arrived in Israel last Wednesday. She visited the Ben Yakir Youth Village near Hadera, where she met with students that immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia.

Last weekend she left the country for Africa, and on Tuesday she plans to visit the Falash Mura camp in Addis Ababa, where she is scheduled to meet Israel’s ambassador to Ethiopia and representatives from the Jewish Agency.

Portman is touring Ethiopia as part of a project organized by The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Federation. During the tour she also plans to visit orphanages and child care centers for children infected with AIDS, with the intention of encouraging American Jews to make a contribution to their welfare.

__________________________________________

‘There have been very difficult times. Harsh times, when it was frankly hell to be here, but some of us were lucky and survived. Thank God. Now this place’ - Alemayehu Eshete gestures towards the shimmering sprawl of Addis Ababa below the terrace where we are sitting - ‘is finally getting noticed.’

On cue, a giant truck laden with bricks and builders gives a mighty honk and rumbles past in an evil cloud of dust and diesel, en route to one of the many construction sites springing up in Ethiopia’s capital. Equally on cue, a flock of goats trots anarchically past, whipped into unruly order by their owner, forcing a shining Toyota 4×4 to a halt. Addis is a city of contrasts, where the future and the past rub constantly, uncomfortably, against each other.

The same might be said of Alemayehu himself. At 60 years of age the singer has lived out a career that has taken him from teenage Elvis impersonator to national stardom as Ethiopia’s answer to James Brown, from singing under duress for North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung in the Eighties to his trans-American tours of today, playing for the booming Ethiopian communities of Washington DC, Atlanta and beyond. Twenty-first century Ethiopia, it transpires, extends way beyond Africa.

Later this month, Ashete’s career begins a more unexpected chapter when he and three other veterans from Addis’s ‘Golden Age’ play London’s Barbican as part of the venue’s ‘Groove Nations’ programme. Then the quartet headline Glastonbury’s Saturday night jazz stage. Alemayehu declares himself unphased at the prospect of wowing the Glasto faithful - after what he and his country have endured, you sense he’s unshockable - but he admits that he and his colleagues are pleasantly astonished to find the music they pioneered in the early Seventies is now in first-world vogue.

And what vogue. The Very Best of Éthiopiques was 2007’s cult hit, swathed in press plaudits, endorsed by Robert Plant and Elvis Costello - who hailed its ’soulful, sorrowful and joyful music’ and ‘defiant human spirit’ - and widely tipped to ‘do for Ethiopia what the Buena Vista Social Club did for Cuba’. A tall order indeed.

A mixture of rugged funk, mesmeric jazz, blousy soul and harp-drenched folk, the 28 tracks of The Very Best are distilled from the series of 23 Éthiopiques albums that is the brainchild of Francis Falceto, a French promoter turned musical curator. Falceto’s series and its Very Best microcosm capture the flowering of Ethiopian pop during the fading years of Emperor Haile Selassie’s reign, a brief, gilded age before a bloodthirsty Communist military junta closed down the country for 18 years, silencing its music in the process.

Today Addis is once more a boom town. Downtown, mammoth new buildings are rising, the concrete skeletons of new five-star hotels sheathed in rickety wooden scaffolding. The city’s ramshackle roads are likewise being upgraded and carry a surprising number of flashy Merecedes saloons and Japanese jeeps alongside flotillas of rickety Lada taxis and bright blue minibuses spewing out black clouds of half-digested diesel, pictures of Arsenal or Barcelona FC stuck in their windows.

Where all this smart money is coming from is something no one seems able or willing to say. Dubai is mentioned, and the cheerful Chinese businessmen in the city’s pizza parlours tell another part of the story, but the principal source of the new wealth seems to be first-world aid. Not the humanitarian aid that pulled the country’s northern provinces out of famine back in Live Aid days, but politically inspired investment. Ethiopia is, after all, a devoutly Christian country in a region where Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise.

The signs of a musical and artistic revival don’t stop there. Out beyond the old leper hospital on the city’s fringes I visit a spacious art gallery opened last year, whose paintings are selling for a healthy £2,000 apiece. Downtown there are swish, cosmopolitan bars and jazz venues like Club Alize, alongside the rootsier tedjbets, drinking holes where all manner of bluesy, folky music is played. Some of this activity is driven by the return of exiles and expatriates, especially from the USA. Various figures are bandied around for the number of Ethiopians in the States, with a million as a mean average, of whom around 100,000 are resident in Washington DC alone.

Though the music you hear pumping from the tape decks of lorries and taxis might include the odd blast of American R&B or rap, it’s local stars who dominate with tunes laced with synths but still chiming with the odd harmonies of East Africa - pin-up Teddy Afro, or the hugely popular Gossaye Tesfaye.

For the moment, though, it is the music of the past that is attracting the attention of the West. Éthiopiques gathers an array of talents, among them singer Mahmoud Ahmed, who lifted a BBC World award last year, Alemayehu Eshete, saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya, and ‘Ethio-jazz’ bandleader Mulatu Astatke. It’s these four who are heading for Europe, backed by the US jazz troupe Ether Orchestra.

The album’s totem tracks probably belong to Mulatu, not least because his spellbinding music featured heavily in the soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch’s 2005 comedy-drama Broken Flowers. Jarmusch had become entranced by Astake’s discordant brass and quavering keyboards after hearing the Éthiopiques 4 release dedicated to him. So entranced that the director searched out Astatke in New York, then wrote an Ethiopian character into the movie to accommodate his music.

Astatke, a solemn, well-spoken 64-year-old, is a very different personality to the effervescent Eshete. I catch up with him before a triumphant show at the Cargo club in London, where he is brilliantly backed by local jazzers the Heliocentrics. Coming from a well-off family, he was packed off to boarding school in Wrexham, where he first developed an interest in music, learning trumpet and clarinet. After moving to London to study music at Trinity College, he became interested in classical and jazz, and was quickly sucked into the capital’s musical life, playing for Latin bandleader Edmundo Ros and absorbing Soho’s jazz scene. ‘It was a thrilling time,’ he says. ‘I became great friends with [club owner] Ronnie Scott and met a lot of talented players - Tubby Hayes in particular, who played both tenor sax and vibes. It was Tubby who first inspired me to take up vibes.’

After a spell at Berklee College in Boston, Astatke founded the Ethiopian Quintet in New York, making his first album in 1966 and returning home at the end of the decade. It was the era of ‘Swinging Addis’. An ageing Haile Selassie still ruled the country like a feudal monarch but the Ethiopian capital had loosened up under the sway of the younger generation and the tides of internationalism. Alongside Ethiopian music the state radio broadcast soul music, much of it introduced via young American peace corps.

In Addis’s downtown hotels resident big bands in crisp tuxedos pumped out a brash fusion of American soul and Amharic pop for a sophisticated audience - then, as now, Addis had an affluent upper class and was an international capital. In the new mood of youthful discontent, even the state monopoly on recording and importing records found itself challenged by an uppity 24-year-old record shop owner, Amha Eshèté. Recording in his back room and sending his tapes to India for pressing, Amha Records’ first release was by Alemayehu Eshete.

For Alemayehu, speaking on a hotel terrace in Addis, where he still lives, such times are both distant and oddly present. ‘We got away with our defiance,’ says Alemayehu, ‘then the Philips label, who had the monopoly, got in on the act, some others too.’

As lead singer with the Police Band, Alemayehu was already a star turn. Not that he was actually in the police force - Ethiopia’s music scene had been largely generated through the various marching bands that had begun in the Forties on the Emperor’s orders. On a visit to Turkey, Selassie had been greeted and impressed by an Armenian brass band and had promptly inaugurated his own musical strike force. Armenian instructors were drafted in and a host of official bands founded, the most eminent being the Imperial Bodyguard Band. Later, the Bodyguard band would fall from grace, when several members were implicated in 1960’s attempted coup.

‘The bands would hire singers, players and dancers,’ relates Alemayehu, who was well known even at school for his cover versions of Elvis Presley. ‘You can’t start from nothing, you have to start from something, and I had watched a lot of Elvis movies. I dressed like an American, grew my hair, sang “Jailhouse Rock” and “Teddy Bear” - sometimes we would do “Strangers in the Night”.’ At this he laughs and gives a creditable croon. ‘But the moment that I started singing Amharic songs my popularity shot up.’

By the time Alemayehu was making records, James Brown had replaced Elvis as his principal influence. ‘Sam Cooke, Brook Benton, Bobby Bland, Nat King Cole… I loved them all, but James was the greatest.’

Listening to the Éthiopiques series, it’s easy to think that black America had more of an influence on Ethiopia than turns out to be the case. It’s not much of a step, for example, from the cosmic jazz of Sun Ra to the mysterious sounds of Mulatu Astatke, or from the primal free jazz saxophone of Albert Ayler to the visceral warrior wails of Getatchew Mekurya. After all, in the era when Addis briefly flourished, black America was turning increasingly to the ‘motherland’ for inspiration, sporting Afro haircuts and dashikis, its jazz champions cutting records called ‘Black Nile’ or ‘Home is Africa’.

For confirmation, I hand Alemayehu a new Blue Note compilation, African Rhythms: Afrocentric Homages to a Spiritual Homeland, featuring the likes of Lee Morgan and Wayne Shorter. After inspecting it he shakes his head, bemused. ‘We weren’t aware of this at all,’ he says.

Even Mulatu, a sophisticated international, turns out to have been unaware of the rippling electronic keyboards of Sun Ra that so much resemble his own. His principal western inspirations were, he says, the orchestral styles of Gil Evans and Duke Ellington - the latter he famously met and worked with when the Ellington band was touring Africa, staying a few days in Addis. Mulatu wrote an arrangement for the Duke, using Ethiopian notation. ‘He was surprised - he said he wasn’t expecting an African to come up with something like that.’

In a country where the voice rules music and lyrics count for a great deal (often saying one thing and meaning another), Mulatu’s instrumental music has never been especially popular, though his arrangements for others, notably singer Tlahoun Gèssèssè, are much admired. Mulatu was responsible for introducing instruments like Fender keyboards, wah-wah pedals, vibes, organs. A musical scholar who is a fellow at Harvard, Mulatu likes to talk technically about the distinctive qualities of Ethiopian music and its use of the five-note pentatonic scale rather than the West’s eight-note scale. He’ll compare the diminished scales used by Ethiopian tribes to Debussy’s, and explain how he melded chants from the Coptic Church, which traces its origins back to at least the third century, into his arrangements.

All Ethiopians, it seems, have a well-developed sense of their country’s uniqueness, be it in their music, religion, language (Amharic is a one-off) or history. Of all the African nations, Ethiopia alone remained independent of the European colonial land grab of the 19th century, keeping its ancient royal line intact down to the overthrow of Haile Selassie in the revolution of 1974.

Selassie’s downfall remains an ambiguous moment for many Ethiopians. Though widely admired by outsiders as a symbol of African stability and even modernity, at home the Emperor was an unpopular autocrat - one of the biggest hits of 1973 was ‘I Can’t Take It Anymore’, a political slogan disguised as a love song.

‘We couldn’t be open in what we sang,’ says Alemayehu, ‘because there was no democracy. Most of the people were against the government because the law wasn’t straight. The king had become old and ministers were just doing what they liked. Still, it was 100 per cent better than what came after…’

Swinging Addis stopped rocking abruptly in 1974 when widespread street protests and anti-government strikes opened the way for a military coup. Headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Communist junta - the ‘Derg’ - imprisoned Selassie, cracked down on dissenters and imposed a night-time curfew that silenced Addis’s nightlife. Amid civil unrest at home, the Derg pursued old enmities against its neighbours - Eritrea, Somalia, Tigray - coming close to defeat in the process, and being saved only by massive military intervention from Soviet and Cuban forces.

For the next couple of years, Ethiopia was plunged into a campaign of ‘Red Terror’ as dissent was ruthlessly suppressed. Military and civilian murder squads roamed the country eradicating ‘enemies of the revolution’, and thousands died or were imprisoned as Mengistu established a ‘Socialist Paradise’. In reality the country was turned into a prison and Mengistu into a Stalinist caricature of an emperor who was by then dead, his body buried beneath a toilet in the palace from which Mengistu now held sway.

Many musicians were among those who fled into exile. Others remained, though unable to perform more than the odd state-sponsored show or sneak the occasional cassette recording through the cultural clampdown. ‘That time was hell,’ says Alemayehu, simply. ‘A lot of people were detained and killed, though not me, I was still popular and even some of the Derg liked me.’

Alemayehu found himself pressed into state service, under government orders to play prestige shows in other African countries or on occasion for allies like Cuba, Russia and North Korea. ‘I was ordered to sing a song in Korean for Kim Il Sung, which I learned, though I had no idea what I was singing. At the theatre people stood up and started clapping for no apparent reason - it was because the president had left his home and was on his way to the show. The applause didn’t stop until he was sat down.’

The 10th anniversary of the Derg’s accession to power in 1984 was accompanied by lavish, Soviet-style celebrations - parades, gymnastic displays, triumphal arches and monuments - though these were soon overshadowed by the calamitous famine that gripped the country’s north. The extent of the tragedy, in which hundreds of thousands of peasants and refugees starved, was at first concealed by Mengistu. When the world’s television screens eventually revealed the unfolding catastrophe, a deluge of humanitarian aid flowed in, led by Band Aid and the following summer’s Live Aid concert.

Though drought and a failed harvest had much to do with the famine, Mengistu was also culpable. Agricultural collectivisation and the scorched earth tactics used by the military against Tigrayan independence fighters also played their part in the tragedy, while the £150m raised by Live Aid was roughly equivalent to the sum lavished by Mengistu on his anniversary celebrations.

For the outside world, the words ‘Ethiopia’ and ‘famine’ became inseparable. For Francis Falceto, the force behind Éthiopiques, this has been a tragedy of a lesser order. ‘The images of the famine on people’s TV screens implanted the idea that Ethiopia was a desert where people die of hunger, whereas most of the country is green, fertile uplands. I wanted to show that Ethiopians were a cultured people, not incompetent beggars who couldn’t feed themselves. I wanted the Éthiopiques series to help break this cliche and change the West’s perception.’

A quixotic figure who ‘has aways been drawn to unknown and experimental music’, the 56-year-old Falceto is an eloquent and inspirational figure, a mover and shaker whose devotion to Ethiopian music underpins much of what has happened over the past decade. He made his first visit to Ethiopia in 1984. A promoter and champion of experimental music, he had fallen in love with a Mahmoud Ahmed record a friend had given him. He decided to visit Addis in the hope of recruiting Ahmed for a European tour. The city he found was a ghost town with his - and everyone else’s - move monitored. ‘I had never been to Africa so it was very frightening and very hard work.’

Falceto’s plans to tour Mahmoud came to nothing, but he met the star, and his brief taste of Addis had him hooked. He began to visit regularly, building up a library of the country’s vanishing musical legacy. ‘I bought every cassette and 45 I could get my hands on, rooting round dusty stalls and back street shops, and befriending the label owners.’ The results of his obsession appeared in 1997, when the first of his beautifully presented Éthiopiques albums was released.

By then the Derg was history, overthrown in a 1991 coup led by the country’s current prime minister Meles Zenawi. Since then Ethiopia has made a stumbling transition into a neo-democracy - the 2005 elections, for example, led to a police massacre of 190 dissenters and the imprisonment of Zenawi’s rivals. Military action against independence movements in Ogaden and Somalia continues amid allegations of human rights abuses.

‘Whatever you think of the current regime, at least musicians are allowed to play what and where they want,’ says Falceto, who for the last few years has been promoting an annual festival in Addis. His co-promoter, Heruy Arefaire, grew up in Washington and returned to a homeland he hadn’t known as an adult. He talks passionately about the ‘Addis Acoustic Renaissance’, and the revival of instruments like clarinet, accordion and mandolin that were once fixtures in Ethiopian music.

This year’s Addis festival included a French jazz group from Toulouse, Les Tigres des Platanes, whose repertoire covers Fela Kuti, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and assorted Ethiopian tracks. Falceto plans to record them alongside Ethiopian singer Etenesh Wassie.

In general, however, Falceto is gloomy about the state of Ethiopian music, which by the time he visited the country had declined into gloop synth players in hotel lounges. ‘Imagine you were 17 in 1974 - for 18 years you couldn’t go anywhere - by the time the regime falls and the curfew ends in 1991 you are 35. That means that no one in that country under 50 has a real folk memory of the glory days of Ethiopian music.’

Yet the country’s appetite for its own brand of pop hasn’t disappeared. Roadside stalls selling bootleg CDs do a brisk trade, and the growing American Ethiopian population provides an eager audience for visitors, and for a growing number of Ethiopian acts, like singers Gigi and Aster Awake, who are based in North America, and who have started to fuse tradition with new flavours.

For Falceto, the Éthiopiques ‘project’, as he calls it, is ongoing. There are more old records to re-release, but you sense that the archaeological phase is over. The sleeping giants whose music he brought to the world are now playing, not just to Ethiopians but to Westerners. Against all odds, there has been a resurrection. ‘It’s all I dreamed of,’ says Mulatu Astatke, ‘for Ethiopia to get recognised. It’s beautiful.’

—- Ethiopiques play the Barbican, London EC2 on 27 June and Glastonbury on 28 June. Éthiopiques: The Very Best of Éthiopiques is out now on Manteca.
To hear Mulatu Astatke at his recent London show at Cargo, go to http://tiny.cc/xz4ZQ

Who was Haile Selassie?

Born Tafari Makonnen, Haile Selassie ruled Ethiopia with an iron fist between 1930 and 1974. But in Jamaica, particularly, he was also hailed as a living God (or ‘Jah’) following the interpretation of a Biblical prophesy by members of a new movement called Rastafari. Bob Marley later did much to popularise the faith. In Ethiopia, there is now a Rasta colony in Shashamane. ‘Rastas promote our flag,’ according to one young writer, ‘but the rest - the Selassie worship, the drugging and idling - have nothing to do with us.’

As headquarters to the African Union, Addis is already the de facto political capital of Africa, a place where business is done among governments, aid agencies and pressure groups. How much the city’s burgeoning role will benefit its endless shanty towns remains to be seen, but some of the political gloss is already rubbing off on the city’s culture. Last year Beyoncé Knowles chose Addis for the opening date of her world tour - at the city’s cavernous Millennium Hall. VIP tickets cost 4,000 Birra (£200), a colossal sum for most Ethiopians, though much of the audience were students with free tickets.

In 1985, 10-year-old Yossi Vasser and his family set out on foot from the Ethiopian village of Uzava. The perilous 700-kilometer journey that ensued took them through the harsh Sudanese desert and eventually on to their spiritual home - Jerusalem.

Fast forward some 23 years and Vasser - now an articulate, seasoned actor in his early 30s - is again preparing for departure: this time he and an ensemble of Ethiopian Israeli actors are traveling to North America to bring a moving account of that courageous journey, One of a Kind - AndArgay, to the stage in both the US and Canada.

The play is a thought provoking and entertaining tale of a young boy (AndArgay) and his family who are swept up in the Ethiopian-Jewish immigration to Israel. The audience gets a glimpse into a unique way of life and bears witness to a family as it deals with a gut-wrenching quandary: whether to remain in the only home it has ever known, or to leave for a country, which for generations, has lived only in its folklore.

The journey that follows evidences a family’s struggle for identity, its dreams and the high price paid to realize those dreams.

One of a Kind - AndArgay is a richly textured production, employing song, dance and drama. In a unique use of animation, Ethiopian drawings are projected onto a screen and act as an extension to both the cast and set. The human actors interact with their animated counterparts to create a vibrant and larger than life performance that entertains as much as it tells a story.

On the eve of the play’s North American tour, producer Howard Rypp and actor/writer Yossi Vasser talk to Israel 21C.

According to Rypp, founder of Nephesh Theater, the production company behind the play, One of a Kind - AndArgay is typical of the type of production that the group stages. “We set out to explore both Jewish themes and social issues, examining different groups within our society - Jews, Arabs, religious, secular, immigrants - the multicultural milieu that exists here, and the conflict and complexities that are born out of it.”

For Vasser, the play has personal significance - the inspiration for the story comes from his own family’s journey. “I realized how important it was for Ethiopian Jews to see the stories that people don’t talk about because of the painful memories that they invoke,” he says.

Over 4,000 people died during the journey: Vasser himself lost two brothers as well as his grandmother.

In Israel, the play has been a runaway success and has won several awards, including Best Play at the prestigious Haifa International Children’s Theater Festival. The production has been staged over 100 times in the past year alone, engaging audiences nationwide: an achievement in a country that roughly equates in size to the US state of New Jersey and with a population about the same as the state of Washington.

For both Vasser and Rypp, the appeal of the play is universal: both have no doubt that audiences in North America will find much to identify with.

“It’s a play for the entire family,” says Rypp. “Not only is there someone there for everyone to relate to - a grandmother, a parent, a child - but it’s also about family unity. Witnessing how this Ethiopian family travel and face extreme hardships together, the strength and the love that they give to one another is an inspiring, moving experience.”

For Vasser, it’s a universal tale about moving from place to place. “It’s a story for our times. So much of this century and the one before have been about people moving. Immigrants all face the same questions, the same issues,” says the actor. Vasser continues “It’s also unique in the way it’s told - there’s innocence to it - even though it’s a choreographed show - it’s very spiritual because it talks about person, place and God. Because of that, people feel a connection to the story.”

Vasser is unable to mask his enthusiasm for the upcoming tour: and one can’t quite blame him. It is indeed remarkable to think that a boy who set out by foot across an African desert is about to end up on a Broadway stage. But this time, thank goodness, he is traveling by plane.

It’s not easy to be a musician in most of the Third World, said legendary Ethiopian composer and musician Mulatu Astatke, who is a 2007-08 Radcliffe Fellow. Music is not typically taught in elementary schools, and in later life, opportunities for musicians are limited by poverty.

In Ethiopia “we have beautiful music, beautiful dance, and in general we have a beautiful culture — but little chance to develop,” said Mulatu (Ethiopians are generally referred to by their first names) in a Feb. 27 presentation.

The slight, soft-spoken composer was at Radcliffe’s 34 Concord Ave. Colloquium Room to give an audience of 70 a primer on Ethiopian contributions to world music — and on his own contributions as a transnational composer. (Mulatu originated a jazz fusion form known as Ethio-jazz. He recently composed music for the soundtrack of director Jim Jarmusch’s 2005 “Broken Flowers.”)

Early on, Mulatu wanted to be an engineer. But he went to high school in North Wales, where a rich arts curriculum allowed him to uncover his talent for music. “I found my calling there,” he said.

Then came more music schooling in London, before Mulatu moved to Boston, where in the late 1950s he was the first African student at the Berklee College of Music — “the only place in that time,” he said, to study jazz.

After further training in New York City, and more than a decade in the West, Mulatu moved back to Ethiopia, where he survived decades of civil war and the vagaries of changing political regimes. Mulatu taught for a living, though he was pressured out of one university job for promoting “imperialist music.” He also pioneered a groundbreaking radio music show in Addis Ababa and traveled frequently into the countryside to perform.

Today, the 67-year-old composer considers part of his musical mission to revive and improve upon the traditional instruments of his country. Modern groups are recording music based on Ethiopian rhythms and musical themes, said Mulatu, but none is reawakening the potential of traditional instruments.

For one, he pioneered the idea of increasing the number of strings on the krar, a bowl-shaped six-string lyre traditionally made of wood, cloth, and beads. He upgraded the instrument — now commonly amplified — to eight strings, then to 12.

If traditional instruments are limited, young players will turn to more versatile Western instruments — and lose a sense of their own culture, said Mulatu. There are ways to alter and improve the old, he said, without compromising the tonal qualities that underlie Ethiopian music.

The composer’s own signature instrument is the vibraphone, a set of graduated aluminum percussion bars that resemble a marimba or a xylophone. In Mulatu’s hands, said Kay Kaufman Shelemay, “the vibraphone becomes the dawal” — the resonant “bell stones” that call the faithful to prayer at Ethiopian churches. (Shelemay, also a Radcliffe Fellow this year, is Harvard’s G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and a professor of African and African American studies.)

After his Western training in music, Mulatu made a study of the complex layering of regional Ethiopian music traditions. It’s “a very diverse and a very [musically] rich country,” said Radcliffe Fellow Steven Kaplan, a professor of African studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At the presentation, he praised Mulatu for delving into lesser-known musical traditions among tribes in southern Ethiopia.

The composer once brought musicians from four different tribes together in an Addis Ababa television studio and orchestrated a cross-tribal fusion performance. Clips from that filming were among the several musical and video interludes played or shown during the Radcliffe event.

To the Western ear and eye, the wind instruments were captivating. They included long trumpetlike wooden horns called malakat and end-blown flutes that each produce one pitch and together a complex melody.

The ideal way “to explore multiple forms” of music, said Mulatu, is through jazz.

Performance opportunities like the one in Addis Ababa also give obscure musicians (many of them farmers) artistic exposure beyond their villages, he said. “These people have been deprived of being heard in the world, or even their own country.”

Performance is also one way of bringing Ethiopian music into the modern age, and to “give identity to modern Ethiopian music,” said Mulatu. “I’ve been writing music here to come up with that identity.” He described the Radcliffe experience — with its opportunities for reflection, collaboration, and composition — as “one of the best years of my life.”

Mulatu is writing music for an electronic opera, and the first section of it will premiere in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre April 14. “The Yared Opera” will blend the old and the new, and incorporate traditional chant texts in Ge’ez, the Ethiopian liturgical language.

Part of the opera score was sneak-previewed on DVD for the Radcliffe audience. It’s based in part on the chant of St. Yared, the founder of Ethiopian church music thought to date back to the sixth century. Mulatu hopes future performances will feature live musicians in concert with the electronic version, and staged at the rock churches of Lalibela, a holy city in northern Ethiopia.

While at Radcliffe, Mulatu is also working on an oral history project with Kaplan and Shelemay. The two scholars have recorded 11 sessions with him so far, including the Feb. 27 presentation. Kaplan and Shelemay sat on either side of him, and alternated asking questions.

The oral history sessions, including DVDs and recordings, will be added to a new collection on Ethiopian musicians in the United States that Shelemay is assembling for the Library of Congress. She called Mulatu an “ambassador” for Ethiopian artistic tradition.

The premiere of the first section of Mulatu Astatke’s ‘The Yared Opera’ is part of a free performance of his works by the Either/Orchestra at 8 p.m. April 14 in the Sanders Theatre. The concert is the final note of an April 13-14 Ethiopian Cultural Creativity Conference at Harvard, which features scholarly presentations on the visual, musical, and literary artistic contributions of the Ethiopian diaspora. For details, visit http://www.music.fas.harvard.edu/ethiopia.html.

The Daily Monitor - Award wining American actress Mena Suvari is visiting Ethiopia in a sign of supporting a US-based foundation forwhich she is goodwill ambassador.

The actress is actively supporting the African Medical and Research Foundation-AMREF’s programs which focus on Africa’s most critical health issues, particularly those issues that affect women and children.

“I am rally pleased to be associated with AMREF-which is the largest health development organization based in Africa and run by Africans,” Ms. Suvari told a press conference at the Edna Mall late on Tuesday.

“I also promise to strengthen collaboration to help African lower status people” she added with tears on her eyes.

The renowned actress is visiting the country from 10 to 16 February, 2008, in a program AMREF organized in association with the Addis Ababa Millennium Secretarial office to relate her visit to Ethiopia to the celebration of the Ethiopian Millennium.

On Monday, actress Suvari met and held discussion with Mayor Berhane Deressa At Edna Mall, a multi complex building which also houses a state-of the-art cinema hall the actress shared to the audience about her works and her personal life experience.

Ms. Suvari, who started her career as a child model, has become one of the most sought after young actresses in Hollywood.

Her extensive film credit include staring in the Academy Award wining American Beauty, American Pie, Spun, Factory Girl and, most recently, the critically acclaimed film stuck opposite Stephen Rea.

AMREF was founded in as the Flying Doctors of East Africa.

Today, AMREF is the largest health development organization based in Africa where 7% of staff is health to escape poverty infrastructure in Africa by closing the gap between the formal health system and communities who need health care services.

AM REF focus on the most critical health issues facing the continent: HIV/AIDS and TB, Malaria, clean water and basic sanitation, family and reproductive health, training health workers and clinical and surgical outreach.

While the movie covers the giant concert the Marley family held in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa in 2005 to celebrate what would have been Papa Bob’s 60th birthday, the primary point of the film is much larger, according to eldest son Ziggy Marley.

“I know [my father] would have said, ‘It’s not about my 60th birthday; it’s about the unity of Africa.’ This is the more important message.’”

“Africa Unite,” which makes its D.C. debut on Saturday, documents the coming together of people from around the world to share ideas, cultures and good vibes against the backdrop of a family-and-friends concert that brings the entire Marley clan together.

But the most powerful aspects come from the historical footage that displays the dehumanizing colonialization of Africa and Jamaica.

Director Stephanie Black (”Life and Debt“) shows how those idiotic ideas continue to affect the stability and underlying mentalities of many nations, helping push the countries of Africa apart rather than bringing them together into something resembling the European Union.

While the look at African history alone — not to mention the music — makes “Africa Unite” compelling, the tug-on-the-heartstrings story of 70-something Ras “Bongo” Tawney, who’s making his first visit to the motherland from his home in rural Jamaica, personalizes the documentary.

“We had to make sure that this wasn’t about the Marleys,” Ziggy said. “It had to … have more meaning. So that’s one of the reasons why that [Bongo Tawney] angle is taken. We’re kids; this man is coming from the roots of [Rastafari]. This man is the real, real deal from the roots. We have to show that to delve deeper into this journey. … It’s about the deeper journey of the roots of Rastafari, the connection to Ethiopia, the unity of Africa.”

» Zanzibar, 700 Water St. SW; Sat., $20, 8 p.m. film screening, followed by a panel discussion and live music by S.T.O.R.M., Proverbs and Inspiration; 202-554-9100. (Waterfront-SEU)

BONUS Q+A WITH ZIGGY MARLEY

» EXPRESS: Many in the Rastafarian movement see former Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I as God incarnate, and he even gave up personal land for those in the faith who emigrated to the country’s Shashamane settlement. But there also have been great tensions between Rastas and the Ethiopian government, especially since Selassie was overthrown in 1974. What accounts for this recent thawing of tensions?
» MARLEY: The understanding that you can’t hide; you can’t run away from that fact. The fact that the Rastafarian movement has made Ethiopia a visible entity in the world. We promote Ethiopia all the time — red, gold and green. I think them just coming around, and the fear that they had of the resurgence of love of the monarchy, I think that fear is gone. That’s not what we’re about; we’re not about anything political. Governments fear when they’re going to lose power, and because we uphold His Majesty Haile Selassie I, they had a fear of that love coming back for the monarchy and there would be political problems in Ethiopia. But once they realize this isn’t a political agenda, then it become more cool. So it’s just a better understanding of what the Rastafarian movement is and it’s not a threat to any political structure.

» EXPRESS: I understand they even screened “Africa Unite” in the royal palace, and Bongo Tawney is shown in the film touring Selassie’s lair and viewing objects of veneration.
» MARLEY: They opened the palace for us during the documentary time. Also, all the belongings and the crown. I think they want to celebrate the history of Ethiopia through His Majesty, not oppress it. After all, England still have a queen — ya know me a say? It’s just colonial mentality, political mentality and the influence of outside forces why Africa, on a whole, doesn’t upload its legacy of kings and queens. Spain still has a queen; Sweden still have a king and queen. But all the kings and queens of Africa, their history is oppressed. Instead of it being something we celebrate, it’s something we hide, while Europe have all the kings and queens that they have, still upholding and loving their legacy. So it’s a whole mental oppression that we have to get over and reconnect with our roots and our traditions and our history.

» EXPRESS: Do you think a film can inspire people to action?
» MARLEY: Go to my Web site, ZiggyMarley.com. There’s a blog there that I wrote that is a message to the African delegation in Jamaica [for the Africa Unite Symposium]. That tells you what we really hope to achieve. What we work for — for anything to become possible, you have to think about it first. Without a thought, it don’t happen. Before man go to the moon, him have to think, “Maybe we can go to the moon.” So the whole idea of what we’re doing here is trying to reignite the spark, to reignite the consciousness of this concept, so it becomes thoughts, then it becomes words, then it becomes action. This is not a political movement; it’s a consciousness movement. And once enough consciousness is raised, then the consciousness pass onto other people until it reach — let’s call them the “leaders” — who can make it possible. We need to raise consciousnesses first before we raise the actual action of it.”

We’re going back there to reignite it among, not on the governmental-political level but among the people level. Because on the governmental-political level, they have their meetings, but there’s not a real agenda out there to say, “Africa unite.” The EU did it — the European Union. The U.S. did it — the United States of America. But our political leaders in Africa have not reached that state of consciousness yet where they can be as selfless as they can, and brave enough, to put this agenda forward to unite Africa.

^{[Portrait of the cast and director from the film The Departed with (left to right) Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Martin Scorsese and Jack Nicholson. Photographed at the Ziegfeld movie theater in New York City, September 26, 2006.]}

Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese has signed on to develop a full-length documentary on the life of the late legendary reggae musician-songwriter Bob Marley. In addition to Scorsese, the project will gain support from multi-millionaire Steve Bing’s Shangri-La Entertainment and international sales agent Fortissimo Films.

The documentary, having already received permission from the Marley family, will also have direct input and support from Marley’s son, Ziggy. He will take on the role as one of the executive producers of the project. “I am thrilled that the Marley family will finally have the opportunity to document our father’s legacy and are truly honored to have Mr. Scorsese guide the journey,” Ziggy said.

While the title of the film has yet to be decided, the release date has already been set for February 6, 2010. This date will mark the 65th anniversary of Bob Marley’s birth. Scorsese is widely recognized for his work on Oscar-nominated films including Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Casino, The Aviator and 2007 Best Picture Winner The Departed.

At only 36 years old, Bob Marley passed away in 1981 from cancer. He has received icon status and his legacy continues from his popularizing of the Ethiopia-centric, ganja-infused Rastafarian religion, giving the entire Caribbean nation a distinct and global projection.

SOURCES: Reuters, Carribean Net News, Variety

Reported By Cyrus Langhorne