Mulatu Astatke & Black Jesus Experience - To Know Without Knowing

The Guardian 60

(Agogo)
The Melbourne collective and 76-year-old Astatke play wedding songs, political rap and cross-continental fusions

Like many great jazz originals liberated by the idiom’s openness to all manner of borrowings and hybrids, the Ethiopian multi-instrumentalist and composer Mulatu Astatke created a new sound by unlikely alchemy – between the Latin grooves and jazz-rock wah-wah guitars he heard as a student in the States in the 60s, and the wide-interval modes and fluid rhythms of his homeland’s ancient traditions. Astatke’s seductive “Ethio-jazz” fusions have made him a global-jazz star since his rediscovery after midlife obscurity by French producer Francis Falceto in the late 1990s.