Tlahoun Gèssèssè, Ethiopiques 17, Buda Musique, CD 822662 (2004)
A glimpse of how revered Tlahoun Gèssèssè is as a great singer and hero to his people for singing songs of love, of warmth and feeling for his country Ethiopia, and of the desire to see Ethiopia free from political oppression is that he was the first person in his nation’s history to be given a state funeral after his untimely death at the age of 68 years in April 2009. His funeral was attended by government officials, musicians and artists, and tens of thousands of people, and Western news media in the UK and US carried news of the funeral as well. And when you hear old recordings of Gèssèssè sing, you can hear why he is so much loved: he not only belts out the songs with passion and a huge range of emotional expression, but his control of volume and notes is unerring and spot-on, and the way he hangs onto a sound and draws it out up and down the scale (known as melisma) is at once freaky and unearthly. In short, the man sings the way you’d expect an angel to sing; no need to wonder why for years Gèssèssè was simply known as The Voice.
On top of the singing, Gèssèssè was backed by musicians of immense talent and skill, in particular Mulatu Astatqe who arranged a number of songs that appear on this compilation. In the 1950s and 1960s, the political situation in Ethiopia prevented people from forming independent bands free of government control and most talented artists gravitated to bands approved by the government; this had the perhaps unexpected result of concentrating a lot of good and raw talent together with access to instruments, teachers and mentors, and sometimes money which came in handy for travel and self-exile if and when the need ever arose (as it did for some artists). Gèssèssè himself benefited from this overall set of arrangements when he arrived as a teenager from the sticks in Addis Abeba in the mid-1950s and started performing in the Hager Fikir Association: his reputation as a singer grew from there and the Imperial Body Guard Band (later dropping the “imperial” bit in the 1960s) swooped and plucked him out of obscurity in the late 1950s and set him on the road to national fame and glory.
From start to finish, with very few exceptions, the songs (spanning 1969 to 1974) boast distinctive melodies, flourishes and rhythms, some of which might have been composed for spaghetti and paella Westerns, kung fu flicks from Hong Kong or even B-grade spy flicks cashing in on the James Bond films of the time. An early highlight is track 3 “Yene felagote” with its repeating melody that seems slightly melancholy and nostalgic, and features a bit of jangle as well. Track 7 “Tezalegn yetentu” has a surprising rhythm that makes the song very memorable. “Selamtaye yedres” is a nostalgia piece with a dreamy air which could also pass as a love song.
Tracks 11 and 12 have a bit of intrigue to them and start a bloc of five truly remarkable songs of exotic and suspenseful atmosphere and Gèssèssè’s own soaring vibrato tones. Songs of nostalgia and love of Ethiopia really get Gèssèssè worked up emotionally and he pours out his heart and soul in tracks like “Yehagere sheta”, a smooth and beautiful piece whose minimal playing allows our man to let rip with the trilling warble. “Ene negn wey antchi” is a curious song in its style, harking back to big brass band orchestras of the 1950s, very snappy in execution, yet very much of its time in Gessesse’s wailing vocals; with this track, the 5-song set ends and we’re almost (but not quite) back on Earth.
The English-language lyrics printed in the CD booklet won’t allow listeners to sing along with Gessesse, who sang mostly in Amharic and occasionally in Oromo (his mother tongue), but they do enable listeners to see the dual nature of the songs he performed: on one level they could be songs of love and romance, on another they are songs about his love for Ethiopia and desire to see Ethiopia as a free nation. The songs he sang did get Gèssèssè in trouble with the authorities and he spent a period in jail in the early 1960s. The booklet does not say what happened to him after 1975 but I hazard that like many other Ethiopian artists of his generation he might have gone into exile overseas.
In these 17 songs, we not only get a snapshot view of Ethiopia’s greatest singer at his peak but also a brief glimpse of the jazz / soul / funk scene in Ethiopia at its most creative (with a number of other singers and musicians also hitting their stride during this time) in the twilight years of Haile Selassie’s reign, when for a brief period the country enjoyed some freedom, before the long dark period of Derg military rule and repression.