Admas draws from and rearranges “golden era” Ethiopian music with then-fairly-new synthesizer and drum-machine rhythms. Steve Kiviat Admas. From left, clockwise: Abegasu Shiota, Henock Temesgen, ...

You’d expect a conversation with Mulatu Astatke to be about music. He is, after all, the father of a musical genre: Ethio-jazz. But when he talks about the art form, he tends to focus on its ...

The golden age of Ethiopian soul music kicked off in the mid '60s with a flurry of horns, eerie keyboards, and whip-crack drumming. Woven through the groove was the strained, conflicted voice of ...

When the band QWANQWA takes the stage of the BU Global Music Festival on Saturday, Sept. 17, it’ll be making its Boston debut — as are five of the other groups playing the free event. But if the ...

TO WESTERN EARS, the music seems both foreign and familiar. Its mood stretches from sultry and haunting to upbeat and vibrant. Soulful Western undertones are audible, yet the overall impression is ...

Open up the book on Ethiopian music and Hailu Mergia should be right there on page one. The keyboardist, army accordionist and synth pioneer spent three decades carving out a national reputation both ...

Music fans have their own entry point to one of Motown’s many eras. For Ethiopia Habtemariam, a seasoned industry veteran who became president of the label in 2014, that experience came when she was ...