pentatonic modes, melodic lines emphasizing the offbeat, muting for amplified strings—that amount to a musical lexicon of Afrodiasporic popular music. These techniques are part of an oral tradition that has accrued cultural capital because, in Gilroy’s (1993) estimation, that music’s affective and symbolic power exists as an alternative to textual traditions that were strictly curbed by racial slavery. Rada’s compositional approach engages and masters those musical styles as de facto texts, transforming them into a canon to be rehearsed and referenced. In her original songs, Rada inserts Tel Aviv into a circuit of blackness that includes New York, Kingston, and Ethiopia by becoming an insider through mastery of this vocabulary.
TABLE 1.2 Comparison of African American musical elements
ETHIOPIAN SOURCE MATERIAL: “NANU NEY”
“Now THAT was a good version of the song.”
“Amazing! Ester’s version is great!”
“Much closer to the original.”
It was the evening of March 6, 2015, and text messages were coming in. I was in Tel Aviv for a few days, and my friend Moshe Morad had invited me to join him on his radio show Misaviv La’olam beShmonim uShmoneh (Around the World in Eighty-Eight) on 88 FM, a Kol Yisrael national radio station. I joined the live broadcast for an hour, discussing Ethiopian music in Tel Aviv and playing songs by musicians performing around town that spring. To represent Rada’s music, Moshe chose the Amharic track from her album, “Nanu Ney” (Audio file 6), and as my acquaintances listened to the broadcast they sent me a barrage of messages, soon followed by comments on the show’s Facebook page indicating their preference for Rada’s version over the one they had heard before (see chapter 3). Some of the commenters could have been referring to the Ethio-jazz standard by Muluken Melesse, but most of them were comparing Rada’s cover to the sample of the song that most young Israelis have heard, “Mima’amakim” by the Idan Raichel Project (2005). I had myself discussed all three songs with Rada only the day before, when I interviewed her, since her engagement with source material from Ethiopia constitutes an important dimension of her positioning as an Afriodiasporic musician.
The original, “Nanu Nanu Ney” (Audio file 7), is a staple from Swinging Addis (see Shelemay 1991 for a description of the repressed music scene in the Derg years of the later 1970s). Like most of the Ethio-jazz repertoire, it is brassy, modal, and fast-paced, and fans of the important Éthiopiques CD series know it. Yet unlike the Ethio-jazz stars who tour widely like Mahmoud Ahmed and Alemayehu Eshete, or who remain beloved at home like Tilahoun Gessesse, Melesse has retired from the music industry and does not have a presence on the touring circuit. His version has taken on a life of its own outside of Ethiopia, since it has been covered and sampled without interventions of its original performer.
In contrast to the arrangement of African American covers, and to original compositions, “Nanu Ney” is Rada’s only recorded rendition of Ethiopian source material, in this case Ethio-jazz. Ethio-jazz developed within a framework of exchange between African and African American musicians in the 1960s and 1970s (Le Gendre 2012: 242), spanning South Africa (Ballantine 1991, Muller 2006), Ghana (Collins 1987, Feld 2012), and Swahili East Africa (Sanga 2010, White 2002). As African musicians adopted rock ’n roll, blues, and jazz, African American musicians visiting Africa for the first time in the 1960s and 1970s looked to ancient Egypt and Ethiopia for iconographies of black power in service of a pan-African ideology. Therefore, “Nanu Ney” is part of a lineage of Afrodiasporic music returning to Africa, Rada’s cover of the song engaging a set of pan-African ideologies that connect her to African American musical vernaculars through their mutual exchange.
The Ethiopian state began to incorporate foreign musical influence from 1924, when Haile Selassie (then regent rather than emperor) brought the Arba Lijotch, a brass band of forty Armenian orphans from Jerusalem, to Addis Ababa. Once brass instruments were introduced, the musical climate of the capital changed quickly, with military bands presenting new repertoire to the public (see Falceto 2002). Within a few decades, Ethio-jazz emerged as a local example of a trend sweeping Sub-Saharan Africa: incorporation of African American musical styles framed as a “return to Africa” inspired by blue notes and political solidarity. According to Francis Falceto, the period of 1960–1974 (when Haile Selassie was overthrown) was a “golden era” for Ethiopian cosmopolitanism and cultural production, with the music scene in Addis Ababa one of the liveliest on the continent thanks to the emperor’s patronage.
The proponents of African fusion forms, like Fela Kuti in the case of Afro-beat (see Waterman 1998), crisscrossed the routes of the black Atlantic—London, New York, and Lagos, eventually transmitting across Africa. In the process they produced syncretic styles that in turn influenced music in the United States in the repertoire of jazz and funk musicians, reaching Addis Ababa in the 1960s. Ethio-jazz is distinctly local, borrowing from the modal system of Azmaris (qignit) and from folk repertoire, but its style stems from cultural processes whereby Ethiopia connected itself to the African diaspora through music. The vernacular of jazz, which incorporated the same instrumentation as the marching band, propelled hybridity based on Western instrumentation and song structure along with Ethiopian melodic lines and Amharic lyrics.
During the Derg period of military rule (1974–1991) following the overthrow of the emperor, the Ethiopian music industry virtually closed down because of (among other factors) a curfew in Addis Ababa and strict border controls (Shelemay 1991). In that period Francis Falceto, working with Buda Musique, rereleased albums by beloved Ethiopian musicians from the regional traditions of the Gurage, Amhara, and Tigray people. The result, now known as Éthiopiques, continues to produce traditional and paraliturgical musical, but the modal, brassy sound of Swinging Addis is still the main Ethiopian musical export today.
At the Madison Square Park concert in New York (June 2014) as at the Rich Mix in London (July 2015), Rada closed the show with “Nanu Ney.” The version adhered closely to her version on the album, which, at under four minutes, is shorter than both her Nina Simone covers and the original by Muluken Melesse. But rather than include it in a medley as she often does in-concert for other covers, she sang the entire song, dancing a makeshift Ethiopian shoulder dance (Eskesta) between the verses, to which the audience responded ecstatically. After presenting a repertoire in New York with a heavy American influence, she concluded by reminding the audience of her African origins.
Rada’s rendition of “Nanu Ney” hews closer to Melesse’s version than her other covers do to their sources. Rather than incorporate her band’s syncretic style, her version follows Melesse’s song structure, including nearly identical instrumentation (rock band plus brass section), meter (6/8 that can be counted or transcribed equally as 4/4), and tonality (modal, heavy on tritones and minor seconds). The band has transposed the song upward by a major second, cut the synthesizers, and reduced the ensemble size, but these modifications still leave the song close to the 1970s version. The band’s adaptations mostly incorporate Afrodiasporic techniques: the string section makes use of funk elements including the wah-wah effect, while the brass section plays slightly after the downbeat (creating subtle syncopation), and handclaps punctuate the introduction.
Meanwhile, singing Melesse’s lyrics about “unfinished business” between estranged lovers in the verses, Rada incorporates minimal ornamentation, retaining the low-pitched and smooth timbre from her other repertoire. The scale provides most of the vocal contrast: each line of verse begins with Rada ascending by a perfect fourth, and then singing the rest of the line on the fourth. In an extended verse of twelve lines, she does this eight times followed by a bridge, where she sings the guitar’s opening motive. Instead of imitating the melismatic Ethiopian vocal style, she does not add improvisation, vibrato or grace notes to her performance. Indeed, her most explicit punctuation is her pronunciation of the explosive letters
