Like many great jazz originals liberated by the idiom’s openness to all manner of borrowings and hybrids, the Ethiopian multi-instrumentalist and composer Mulatu Astatke created a new sound by unlikely alchemy – between the Latin grooves and jazz-rock wah-wah guitars he heard as a student in the States in the 60s, and the wide-interval modes and fluid rhythms of his homeland’s ancient traditions. Astatke’s seductive “Ethio-jazz” fusions have made him a global-jazz star since his rediscovery after midlife obscurity by French producer Francis Falceto in the late 1990s.
Astatke’s partners since have unexpectedly included some of the UK’s most original free-jazz players, but in recent years the band best attuned to his ancient-to-modern sensibility has been Melbourne’s Black Jesus Experience, a collective of singers, rappers, and jazz improvisers of Moroccan, Zimbabwean, Maori, Ethiopian and Australian origins. On an old classic, Mulatu, the composer segues his glowing vibraphone sound into a bright trumpet theme and a floating drums/keys/wah-wah groove, before MC Mr Monk’s driving political rap. Ambassa Lemdi, an Ethiopian traditional song that mesmerising vocalist Enushu Taye learned from her grandmother, is delivered by her in Amharic with tone bends and drifting lines of solemn wonderment. The headlong wedding song Kulun Mankwaleshi is rammed with more rhythm-stretching melody than its groove ought to have room for, the polemical 10-minute Living on Stolen Land is a highlight, while Astatke’s racing Mascaram Setaba has a beguiling Afrobeat bounce. The set feels like the band’s more than the veteran master’s, and the magnificent Taye’s singing balances better with the music than Mr Monk’s delivery, but To Know Without Knowing nonetheless confirms how brightly Mulatu Astatke’s Ethio-jazz vision burns on.
John Fordham/The Guardian