Most of us don’t think of music as a science. Mulatu Astatke, the Ethiopian vibraphonist who created the style known as “Ethio-jazz,” says he’s never thought of his invention as anything else.
“I’ve always called it a science,” the 80-year-old musician explains from his hotel in San Francisco — where he’s beginning the U.S. tour that will bring him to the Howard Theatre on June 23 and 24. “… The audiences are also seeing it that way: as an experimental science of music.” It’s something like chemistry, he adds, where elements combine to form substances that are completely new but still retain properties of those elements.
“The music is a combination of all you hear. On top, you can hear the whole world: Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Michael Jackson, Europe, Asia, everything. But at the bottom, it’s always Ethiopian. That’s the science of Ethio-jazz,” he says.
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The sound that Astatke developed over 60 years ago has slowly risen to become renowned and adored around the world. It’s found particular enthusiasm in the last decade, when streaming services started including tracks by Astatke and his contemporaries — saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya, singer Alemayehu Eshete, keyboardist (and D.C. resident) Hailu Mergia — in their playlists.
For Astatke, it’s a vindication of the decades he’s spent traveling the globe, demonstrating his science to audiences of all stripes.
“For 50 years, I’ve been struggling to make this Ethio-jazz known to the world,” he says. “Finally, it’s happened, and I’m so happy.”
Born in Jimma, in southwestern Ethiopia, Astatke initially aspired to be an aerospace engineer. Once he began studying that subject in Wales, however, he discovered his passion for music and instead moved to London and earned a degree from Trinity College of Music. He then came to the United States to enroll at Berklee College of Music in Boston.
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At Berklee, while studying jazz, Astatke chafed at the degree to which he was transcribing parts of the Count Basie or Duke Ellington orchestras. “I said, ‘I’m sitting here, I’m going to one of the top jazz schools in America. How come I don’t become myself? That’s the whole thing.’”
Jazz musicians, Astatke learned, often use pentatonic (i.e., five-note) blues scales to improvise. Traditional Ethiopian music also uses pentatonic scales: Specifically, a set of four five-note modes with wide intervals (called qeñet) between the notes form the music’s basic foundation.
In his desire to develop an individual sound, Astatke decided to see what happened when he swapped out jazz’s pentatonic harmonies for Ethiopian ones. That experiment was the birth of Ethio-jazz, a sound that to lovers of Black American music is both comfortingly familiar and fascinatingly foreign.
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It’s the consistent presence of qeñet modes in his music that Astatke refers to when he says that the bottom is always Ethiopian. “I put these four modes on the bottom, and built the whole world on top,” he says. “That’s how Ethio-jazz is put together. Always those four modes are there: always Ethiopia.”
Astatke spent most of the 1960s living and working in New York, where he formed his Ethiopian Quartet (name aside, most of the band members were Puerto Rican) and incorporated Latin rhythms into the Ethio-jazz concept. He returned to his homeland in 1969. However, it was in Brooklyn that he made the genre-defining album “Mulatu of Ethiopia” in 1972, combining the qeñet modes with jazz, funk, Latin rhythms and even psychedelic rock. (Last month, Britain-based Strut Records issued a new special edition of “Mulatu of Ethiopia” on white vinyl.)
It wasn’t until the early 1970s that he brought the new sound back to his homeland. He joined Duke Ellington on the legendary bandleader’s 1973 tour of Ethiopia and Zambia, which culminated in their performing together in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, for Emperor Haile Selassie.
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Selassie was deposed the following year by a military junta, whose strict curfew and censorship curbed Astatke’s career in Ethiopia. While many musicians emigrated, Astatke stayed and worked as a music teacher until the junta collapsed in 1991.
Astatke’s career wasn’t really revived until 1998, when the French label Buda Musique included Astatke’s early recordings on a series of compilations called Ethiopiques. He gained success touring in Europe, Asia and Australia, with occasional trips to the United States. Somehow, though, the D.C. area — which hosts the world’s largest Ethiopian community outside of Africa — has been a rare stop on his itinerary.
“I never really have the chance to come over and play,” Astatke says. (He was in Alexandria in October to receive an award during the 2023 Grand African Run.) “But now that Ethio-jazz is beloved and admired all over the world, it is so nice also to be able to come over, to perform for the Washington audience, and I hope they will understand what the science of Ethio-jazz is all about. I think they will really enjoy it.”
June 23 and 24 at 8 p.m. at Howard Theatre, 620 T St. NW. thehowardtheatre.com. Sunday sold out; Monday $35.
