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.
Also out this month
Polish pianist Marcin Wasilewski’s imaginative trio meet US sax giant Joe Lovano on Arctic Riff (ECM), an ethereal, tonally luxurious meeting of hearts and minds including two accounts – one dreamy, one free-rhythmically restless – of the Carla Bley classic Vashkar. New York-based saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and pianist Kris Davis commune together on Blood Moon (Intakt), on subtly sinewy originals and free improv. Brad Mehldau’s Suite: April 2020 (Nonesuch) is an unaccompanied lockdown meditation of pensive and restrainedly playful originals, and understated covers of Billy Joel, Neil Young and Jerome Kern classics. And UK bassist/composer Misha Mullov-Abbado gives his harmonically lustrous sextet music more of an as-live edge on his Jasper Høiby-produced third album, Dream Circus (Edition).
