Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument, Shemonmuanay, New York, Awesome Tapes From Africa, CD ATFA 006 (2013)
First released on cassette in 1985, this album is a quirky one-of-a-kind recording made by Ethiopian accordionist / keyboardist / former Ethio-jazz band leader Hailu Mergia in Washington DC after he settled in the States. The release was intended by Mergia as a nostalgic homage to the accordion music he remembered from his youth. Eleven instrumental tracks draw on Mergia’s native Amharic and Oromo folk music traditions and melodies to combine with Moog synthesiser, electric piano, accordion and rigid machine-generated rhythms: the result is highly atmospheric and evocative sinuous music that touches the ground very lightly but is, at one and the same time, exotic and smoky, futuristic and questing, fleeting and impermanent. I can see why the Buda Musique compilers of that otherwise perfect Ethiopian historic jazz music library series Ethiopiques give this album a wide berth: “Shemonmuanay” isn’t exactly bursting with fire, energy and a robustly positive attitude drinking deeply of the brief liberation Ethiopia experienced in the twilight years of the Emperor Haile Selassie in the mid-1970s – instead the album seems to look wistfully back to an age of glamour in some tracks and on others muses on the impermanence of things as they are, and perhaps of life itself.
The album begins with the title track which is a slightly sinister, sultry piece that might have been lifted from a soundtrack to a spy film set in Algeria or Morocco during World War II or in Vietnam in the 1950s (Michael Curtiz’s famous “Casablanca” film or Phillip Noyce’s “The Quiet American”?), so languid yet so bewitching and hot in atmosphere it feels. “Laloye” is an odd mix of wistful accordion nostalgia, crisp sharp electronic beats and sunny laid-back rhythms. There is something about this track and a few others on this album that may resonate with listeners from east Asian countries like China, Japan and Korea: there is a definite air of quiet “c’est la vie” resignation about things and memories that have receded into the past and which can never come back.
“Wegene” might well have arrived from the early Seventies period from a parallel Earth, in which soul, funk and psychedelia combined to produce a futuristic soundtrack for laid-back citizens of a rich sub-Saharan country, one which in our world is dirt poor and plagued by a series of Third World dictators, a humongous debt and an economy in thrall to distant foreign corporations. “Hari Meru Meru”, one of the few songs to feature vocals (even if they are wordless) is a dreamy instrumental poem of winding accordion melody, lightly boppy synth-drum beats and melancholy electric piano: if I didn’t know that it was the brain-child of an Ethiopian musician, I could have sworn it was an old Chinese folk melody because the tunes have that oddly trilling, throwaway quality.
Some later tracks are a little fussy and the drawback of using quite rigid machine rhythms and beats becomes apparent: the music on some pieces sounds like excerpts of much longer, continuous melody and rhythm pieces that have no beginning and no end. “Hebo Lale”, another track with wordless vocals, has a wonderful wide-eyed and innocent ambience that reminds me of Amon Duul’s “Tanz der Lemminge” album that I haven’t played in a while: cheery accordion melody waltzes about with skippetty electric piano and equally joyful analog synthesiser lines. The album closes with the easy-going “Shilela” which is equal parts dreamboat nostalgia, soulful funk and utopian space lounge music.
This is really very beguiling music, all the more so because it was created during a period when musicians were switching over from live instruments and analog synthesisers to drum machines and other newer studio technology and methods of creating and recording music so there was considerable overlap between two different generations of music and music recording technology. “Shemonmuanay” is a snapshot of that brief crossroad period against a background of Ethiopian pop and folk music that may have been dying out at the time as well. The album, Janus-like, looks forwards to machine-driven music and backwards to a lost time-zone of highly emotional and sultry mood music. I hope that this reissue brings some attention to Hailu Mergia and restores him to his rightful place as a music pioneer in fusion music; according to information on the CD reissue sleeve, he’s working as taxicab driver at Washington DC’s Dulles International airport. Not a great outcome for an artist who single-handedly created a minor classic but worse things have happened to other musicians and artists unfortunate enough to have come within the radar sights of tyrannical governments in their countries.