Playing with the Either/Or Orchestra Astatke continues to evolve his langourous complex sound into a novel brew. In Mulatu Steps Ahead he creates a prolific platform where his music and his solid players can navigate the funky challenges he lays out for them. This is very good shit.
Interview with Mulatu at The Economist:
Baobab: While at Berklee in the late 1950s and early 1960s, you started to combine what you were learning about jazz theory with the Ethiopian music you had grown up with. How did that happen?
Mulatu Astatke: My experiences in Boston and New York opened my eyes. I became a student of jazz composition and learnt how the music comes together. It helped me quite a lot, and helped me to find Ethio-jazz. There were so many great musicians at that time, and I lined up with everyone else to watch them. I met John Coltrane, I saw Bud Powell. Now I see people lining up to see me in Paris and Berlin. That's so beautiful to me. I’ve been very lucky.
Baobab: Since then you seem to have focused on fusing traditional Ethiopian music with jazz and worked hard to develop a distinct voice and style. Is that fair?
MA: Fusion and contribution, that’s my thing. There have been tribes in Ethiopia for centuries. Then we see Charlie Parker and the music he’s playing using diminished chords. I always say that Africa gave to jazz its whole feeling and conception. Not only the drums, but the science. Musicians are like scientists, just with different chemicals. There’s no difference between science and music, we just deal with sound. We are scientists of sound.
Baobab: Ethio-jazz has a melancholy sound to it. Why is that?
MA: We play five against twelve. This is a pentatonic scale that has been fused with a 12-tone progression. My thing was to combine these two without losing our character. The five is floating on top. You see this in Asia, in Japan, in Algeria. We have four different modes, and three modes for church music. It’s very beautiful. It’s all in how you approach the scales and the notes.
Baobab: You’ve opened a jazz village in Addis to train young Ethiopian musicians. What are your goals for the centre?
MA: It’s an information centre. We host jazz concerts and Ethiopian plays, and teach Ethio-jazz. We want to promote music to young pupils who have talent but who have never had a chance. We’re teaching the science of music—arranging, composing. I tell my students, learn the science of music first, don’t just jump in too quick. There is a line you have to follow.
Review of Mulatu's Mulatu Steps Ahead at Pitchfork:
For one thing, much of Astatke's past music, especially his classic stuff, was much more structured and stately than what he does here. It's as though he's come out of his Ellington period and he's moving into a looser, more improvisational realm. The band eases into the album with ambient opener "Radcliffe", guys in a room gathering steam together, and the sound coalesces on "Green Africa". By the time they get into "The Way to Nice", they're hammering out a swinging groove.
The way the saxes wind through pentatonic themes in unison on "Mulatu's Mood" recalls classic Astatke, and they give a solo to the bass sax and another to a kora, a West African harp that Mulatu drags across the continent and seamlessly inserts into his own music. He reaches way back into his own catalog on "I Faram Gami I Faram", a tune he originally wrote and recorded in New York in 1966. The combination of Ethio jazz texture, Latin rhythm, melismatic Ethiopian lead singing and salsa backing vocals is amazingly natural, and it's a much more distinctive version than the original, which features a more typical boogaloo vocal.
It's great to hear Mulatu himself stretching out, soloing on "Ethio Blues" and creatively filling out the chords elsewhere. Anyone who's liked his music in the past is very likely to enjoy this, but I think Mulatu Steps Ahead will broaden Astatke's jazz following as well, and frankly, it's a much more coherent record than a lot of heavily improvisational modern jazz albums. It's a very easy album to access for listeners who aren't particularly schooled in either jazz or the Ethiopiques series as well, moving an old, appealing sound forward and outward. It's a pleasure to hear a man of Mulatu's age and past accomplishments push himself artistically like this, and it will be interesting to see where his music goes next.
Review of Mulatu Steps Ahead at Dusted Reviews:
Mulatu Steps Ahead was made mostly with the Either/Orchestra and it emphasizes the jazz side of Astatke’s music. Instead of the sturdy R&B grooves of vintage Ethio-jazz, Astatke and his mostly American ensemble play acoustically accomplished rhythms with a pronounced sense of swing. “Radcliffe,” named for the college where Astatke enjoyed a residency a while back, steps most deliberately, with the forward motion mostly coming from a muted trumpet wreathed in swirls of piano, Gil Evans-like horn charts, and Astatke’s own vibraphone. The next tune, “Green Africa,” unveils a more pan-African side to Astatke’s music. While it does feature traditional Ethiopian stringed instruments, there’s also a West African balafon and a bass line that feels quite Moroccan.
When Astatke looks back, he looks away from Ethiopia as often as not. “The Way To Nice,” which features a few Heliocentrics including the superb trumpeter Byron Wallen, appropriates a John Barry theme to set a cool James Bond vibe. And “I Faram Gami I Faram,” a tune 44 years ago in New York, sets Amharic words to an unabashedly Nuyorican rhythm. Another reclaimed tune, “Mulatu’s Mood,” furthers the Pan-African vibe with a lilting Malian kora, an instrument that has as much to do Ethiopian culture as the Celtic harp has to do with Bulgarian music. And he uses two traditional Ethiopian melodies as frameworks for repeating horn figures that feel more like American minimalism than Ethio-jazz. The individual elements on Mulatu Steps Ahead often feel well aged, but the way Astatke has put them together takes them out of time. Instead they represent the latest progressive step of a singular talent.
The title of Mulatu Steps Ahead is something of a paradox: In meaning, it suggests a forward momentum, a creative leap in a new direction, but in form, it’s not forward-thinking so much as it’s deliberately retro-gazing, a throwback reference to classic Columbia and Blue Note jazz titles, specifically Miles Ahead. And so it is with the music: This is Ethiopian jazz legend Astatke following his muse into unexpected new places, even as he combs the past for signposts to guide him. Given that the man essentially created an entire genre of music– Ethio-jazz– the thought of him looking backward might seem initially disappointing– why would a long-time pioneer suddenly be content to take the road more traveled?– but in reality, Mulatu’s doing what he’s always done; his music has always drawn heavily from traditional Ethiopian forms and melodies, even as he twists them to suit his own purposes, which is basically what he does here. The difference– the thing that makes this record a “step ahead”– is that here, the Ethiopian master engages American jazz tropes more directly than he ever has before; it’s no small irony, then, that this happens to rank among his more exotic and otherworldly studio creations.
Astatke hasn’t released an album of new material in some time; instead, he’s been challenging himself with exciting new collaborations (such as his session with the Heliocentrics last year) and storing up thrilling new compositions, many of which appear here, along with a few new workings of older Mulatu tunes. The album opener, “Radcliffe,” introduces the album’s basic conceit: It begins as a cloud of dissonance, coming from Ethiopian flutes and bowed violins, before the warm sound of a trumpet– yes, with striking tonal similarities to Miles Davis– bring focus to the piece. It’s the sound of two worlds colliding, and its slowly-unfurled, dreamlike pace make it sound like some hallucinatory meditation. The other side of the coin comes in the form of “The Way to Nice,” a spry groove that recalls both the composer’s 007-ish riffs from the Broken Flowers soundtrack as well as his album with the Heliocentrics, some of whom appear here.
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