Mulatu Astatke

In the organizer's words:

Mulatu Astatke is one of Ethiopia's most famous musicians and arrangers, best known for changing the face of Ethiopian music during the "Swinging Addis" era in the late 60s and 70s. He is the father of the music he called "Ethio Jazz".

Mulatu studied piano, clarinet and harmony and graduated in music from Trinity College Of Music in London before studying at the Eric Gilder School Of Music in Twickenham, whose students included Osibisa frontman Teddy Osei and singer-songwriter Labi Siffre. Mulatu immersed himself in the London jazz scene, playing vibraphone and piano at the Metro Club in Soho, Edmundo Ros' Club in Regent Street and Ronnie Scott's alongside expatriate African and Caribbean musicians.

In 1963, Mulatu moved to the United States to enroll as the first African student at the jazz-oriented Berklee College Of Music in Boston to study vibraphone and percussion (previous students included vibraphonist Gary Burton and pianist Keith Jarrett). It was here that he began to listen to Latin jazz and integrate it into his own music. In 1966, he recorded his first two albums Afro-Latin Soul, Volumes 1 & 2, in New York City for the independent Worthy label. The albums were early experiments as Mulatu began to refine his ethio-jazz sound, accompanied by vibraphone and backed by a New York band of Latin musicians.

When Mulatu returned to Addis Ababa in 1969, he was determined to create his own, more ambitious musical fusion. In Addis, he encountered a booming, progressive nightlife scene that offered plenty of scope for new directions. He called his new music "Ethio Jazz" and his recordings from this period show how he worked with local musicians, playing in the four basic pentatonic keys they had grown up with, to give a new twist to the structures he had brought with him from America.

And he began to use traditional Ethiopian instruments in new ways, which was particularly controversial in Ethiopia: Krar (lyre), masenqo (one-stringed fiddle) and washint (penny flute) were repurposed for Mulatu's new jazz blend.

The sound we now call ethio-jazz began to take serious shape in the early 70s with Mulatu's growing influence and reputation. He recorded the classic Mulatu Of Ethiopia for Worthy in New York in 1972 and had teamed up in Addis with Amha Eshete, an ambitious young music fan who had founded Ethiopia's first independent label, Amha Records.

Some of his most famous recordings appeared on his album Yekatit Ethio Jazz (1974), on which he combined traditional Ethiopian music with American jazz, funk and soul, as well as six tracks on the compilation album Ethiopian Modern Instrumentals Hits. "I was left alone because I never got involved in politics," says Mulatu. "My music was instrumental and was therefore never considered controversial."

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front took power and established a parliamentary republic. The first record in the Ethiopiques series, released in 1998 on the Buda Musique label, was to be the first of ten. However, when film director Jim Jarmusch included half a dozen pieces by Astatke in the soundtrack of his 2005 comedy-drama Broken Flowers, starring Bill Murray, the music became known to a wider audience and the series was expanded to 29 volumes.

Mulatu's influence now spread internationally. National Public Radio in the US used his instrumentals as backing tracks or between songs, notably on the program This American Life, and his music has been sampled by some of the leading lights of modern hip-hop, including Nas & Damian Marley, Kanye West and Madlib.

In the late 2000s, Astatke began devoting his energy to "celebrating the original scientists of the tribes of Ethiopia, the unheralded people who created our traditional instruments." In 2008, he completed a fellowship at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute, where he worked on modernizing traditional Ethiopian instruments and premiered part of a new opera, The Yared Opera. As Abramowitz Artist-in-Residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he gave lectures and workshops and advised the MIT Media Lab on the development of a modern version of the krar, the traditional Ethiopian lyre.

By the mid-2010s, Mulatu had brought Ethio Jazz to all major continents through his tours, constantly gaining new fans of all ages while participating in countless collaborations.

In 2025, the father of Ethio Jazz will embark on a major farewell tour and release a new studio album, Mulatu Plays Mulatu, for Strut. The album was recorded at RAK Studios in London and at his Jazz Village Club in Addis. The album features his full big band together with Ethiopian musicians and is a fitting end to an incredible career. "All my life I've wanted to bring Ethio-jazz to all corners of the world for people to enjoy, and I feel I've succeeded," says Mulatu. The world of music would definitely echo those words.