An absolute landmark in African music, this Sunday classic is about Mulatu Astatke’s sublime 1972 album, “Mulatu Of Ethiopia”.
Mulatu the man is, as you’d imagine, a cool character. He left the sprawling Addis Ababa at 16-years old in 1959 to attend college in North Wales for a future in engineering. But, the music just ran too deep and his gifts instead took him to Trinity College of Music in London, where he studied piano, clarinet and harmony, and to the Eric Gilder School of Music in Twickenham. He began playing live (vibraphone and piano) in Soho's jazz clubs, building a fine reputation before leaving London in 1963 to enrol at the jazz-oriented Berklee College in Boston, becoming in turn the first African student at the iconic institution.
Richard Williams wrote an excellent and thorough biography back in 2014 for the Guardian and you can read more, here.
“I left the UK for America and studied at Berklee College in Boston. I learnt the technical aspects of jazz and gained a beautiful understanding of many different types of music. That’s where I got my tools. Berklee really shook me up.” - Mulatu Astatke
The album was recorded in New York and originally released in 1972. Seven free-flowing and deeply melodic meditations, with Mulatu’s trademark vibraphone setting the hypnotic tone and the centre point for swirling organs, flutes and horns. Although the aura is gloriously loose, this is meticulously arranged. Astatke was a brilliant bandleader, working closely with his musicians to realise his new mix of the traditional and the modern.
An outlier of an entire scene that followed and just really cool from its first beats to its last.
