Rough Guide to the Music of Ethiopia

1	Addis Ababa Bété / Alèmayèhu Eshèté
2	Ené Nègn Bay Manèsh / Girma Bèyènè
3	Altchalkum / Mogès Habté
4	Dodge / Netsanet Mèllèssè
5	Muziqawi Silt / Wallias Band
6	Tchèwata / Fanayé Tesfayé
7	Selé Senè Seqlèt / Alèmu Aga
8	Y’shebellu / Aster Aweke
9	Antchi Hoyé Lèné / Yared Tèfèra
10	Alegntayé / Tlahoun Gèssèssè
11	Bèmen Sèbèb Letlash / Mahmoud Ahmed
12	Hasabé / Tèshomè Meteku
13	Sabyé / Mulatu Astatqé
14	Eté Endénèsh Gèdawo / Muluqèn Mèllèssè
15	Medley / Adanèh Tèka

Barnes & Noble

Francis Falceto is the man behind the ongoing Ethiopiques series (16 volumes have appeared so far), documenting with unerring ear the tremendously funky '70s sound of Addis Ababa, plus some folkloric discursions and contemporary scenes. So there's really no one better to distill the music of this 3,000-year-old country for Rough Guides. Of course, making Ethiopiques seem irrelevant wouldn't do, and there are many more musical gems in the series, but Falceto does an honest job of gathering the highlights on one disc. The '70s urban music, captured on such afropop classics as The Golden '70s, is the best: The combination of ancient-sounding tenor sax charts, psychedelic guitar, and James Brown funk is just compelling. The Rough Guide includes what's perhaps Falceto's greatest discovery, "Muziqawi Silt" from the Wallias Band, which sounds like the spy-music soundtrack to the biblical Exodus from Egypt, as well as a track each from heartthrob Mahmoud Ahmed and soul veteran Tlahoun Gèssèssè, who made their mark in the freewheeling days before the Derg dictatorship. Mulatu Astatqé, ubiquitous in this era, is also represented with his quixotic Ethio-Jazz (the erstwhile musician once performed with Duke Ellington), alongside the émigrés who have kept up his goal of Ethiopian fusion abroad. But all is not cabarets and discos -- the mind-blowing begena, one of the world's oldest musical instruments, is claimed to be the lyre struck by King David, or at the least his grandson, the first king of Ethiopia, Menelik I, son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The strange, subsonic drones of this instrument, as played by Alèmu Aga, prove that Ethiopia's capable of surprising world music explorers anew, and this set is just the beginning. Mark Schwartz

All Music Guide

Taking something of a break from their usual tendency to take a wide range of music from an area, the folks at Rough Guide have this time around focused their attention in on only one major aspect of Ethiopian music: the 'swinging '60s''. Admittedly, this is by far the most important period in Ethiopian popular music, with everything since being shaped, in some part, by the stars of the day. The sound is entirely unique, much like the rest of the nation's identity. During this period of creative exploration, the sound of Addis Ababa's nightlife was cemented to some extent, making heavy use of atypical piano progressions by masters such as Alemayehu Eshete and Girma Bèyènè, and jumping, roving, off-balance but powerful horn arrangements (the brass section was just developed in the last century, after a gift from Russian tsars to the country's official bands around the turn of the century). Vocals cover the range from the same sort of roving aesthetic to the more popularized and somewhat more streamlined concepts of Mahmoud Ahmed. Somewhat more modern stars are also represented, hailing largely from the time of the 'Derg', under a Stalinist government -- Aster Aweke and Netsanet Mellesse both hail from this period, though their ultimate popularity has come afterward. Despite the lack of the more ancient sounds of Ethiopia (there is one piece played on the ancient begena here), it's an outstanding album, with an interesting focus on some of the slickest, jazziest, and yet most foreign-sounding music many Westerners are likely to hear. Give it a spin or two just for curiosity's sake, but keep listening to the hooks. Adam Greenberg