AYALEW MESFIN-GOOD ADERGECHEGN

Ayalew Mesfin stands aside the likes of Mulatu Astake, Mahmoud Ahmed, Hailu Mergia and Alemayehu Eshete as a legend 1970s Ethiopia. The music he created with his Black Lion Band is amongst the funkiest to arise from Addis Ababa. Ayalew Mesfin’s recording career, captured in nearly two dozen 7” singles and numerous reel-to-reel tapes, shows the strata of the most fertile decade in Ethiopia’s 20th century recording industry, when records were pressed constantly by both independent upstarts and corporate behemoths, even if they were only distributed within the confines of this unconquerable East African nation. For many who hold this album in their hands, the music created in ‘70s Ethiopia will sound both familiar and alien: while the trappings of ‘70s Ethiopian music carry some aspects that those in the West will easily identify with – trap drum kits, jazz big-band styled horn sections, guitars played through wah wah and fuzz pedals – the Ethiopian style of singing, and the modes in whi