VA - Rough Guide To Ethiopian Jazz (2016)

New Orleans is widely seen as the birthplace of jazz, where African slaves created groundbreaking music that fused elements from both Africa and Western traditions. By the twentieth century, jazz (and subsequent African-based musical forms including soul, funk, and Cuban rumba) travelled back across the Atlantic, first through recordings and later by artists on tour. There, African musicians immediately recognized the source roots, adapted some, altered others, and in the process, created entirely new musical forms. In Ethiopia, one of the first major musicians to lay the groundwork for Ethio-jazz was Nerses Nalbandian. His family escaped the Armenian genocide in Turkey, and settled in Ethiopia, where Nalbandi would become a band leader for many burgeoning Ethio-jazz musicians in the 1950s. Largely credited as being the greatest innovator of Ethio-jazz and exposing it to the world, Mulatu Astatke was born in 1943 in Jimma, Ethiopia.