Mahmoud Ahmed

Mercato and the Arizona Club

Mahmoud Ahmed was born on 8 May 1941 in the Mercato district of Addis Ababa, to parents from rural Gurage. As a young man he shined shoes and took odd jobs, and he admired the singers Bizunesh Bekele and Tilahun Gessesse. He found work as a handyman at the Arizona Club, where the Imperial Bodyguard Band spent its evenings after hours. One night in 1962 the band's singer failed to turn up. Mahmoud asked to sing a few songs and was soon part of the regular line-up. He later recalled that once the first song was over, nerves and all, he could no longer tell what was in front of him.

Swinging Addis

He stayed with the Bodyguard band until 1974 and called it his school. He named Tefera Kassa, Tilahun Gessesse and Alèmayèhu Eshèté as influences, loved American records, and said that in the end all of it rested on the blues. His first single, Nafqot New Yegodagn, came out on Amha Records in 1971 with the Venus Band. Philips singles with the Bodyguard band followed from 1972, among them his first recording of Tezeta, issued as Tizita. In 1973 he made the LP Almaz with the Ibex Band.

In 1974 he made Alemye, the monarchy fell, and he left the Bodyguard band and started his own label, Mahmoud Ahmed Records. Under the Derg a curfew drove music nightlife underground. In 1975 he recorded the Kaifa LP Erè Mèla Mèla with the Ibex Band, along with a run of singles. His own label issued Jeguol Naw Betwa in 1978, after which censorship ended vinyl and he turned to cassettes. Through the 1980s he ran a music store in the Piazza district, toured the United States with the Walias Band in 1980 and 1981, and recorded with the Roha Band. The producer Dawit Yifru made eight albums with him across his years with the Dahlak and Roha bands.

That was my school.

Mahmoud Ahmed on the Imperial Bodyguard Band, 2002

Erè Mèla Mèla reaches Europe

A French stage manager touring with a theatre group heard his music in an Addis street, bought a record and sent it to Francis Falceto, who then travelled to Ethiopia. In 1986 Crammed Discs of Brussels released Ere Mela Mela, the first record of modern Ethiopian music issued in Europe, with Hannibal following in the United States. Robert Christgau gave it a B+ and found Ahmed a singer of real authority. Its spirit ran against the Western picture of Ethiopia as a place of famine and repression.

It was the first Ethiopian album Falceto heard, and it set him on the road to Éthiopiques, the Buda Musique series in which four volumes belong to Mahmoud alone: Almaz (volume 6), Erè Mèla Mèla (volume 7, 1999), Alèmyé (volume 19, 2005) and his Imperial Bodyguard Band sides (volume 26, 2010). Songlines called Erè Mèla Mèla a masterwork of psychedelic soul.

A world stage

The 1990s brought cassettes, a best-of called Tizita in 1996, Soul of Addis on Earthworks and Live in Paris, recorded at the Théâtre de la Ville. In 2000 he made Hulum Yisma with the 3M Band. Russ Gershon's Either/Orchestra of Boston built a long collaboration with him, and their March 2006 concert at the Banlieues Bleues festival became the DVD Ethiogroove. In 2007 Robert Plant presented him with the BBC Radio 3 Award for World Music at the Barbican in London, and he played Glastonbury in 2008.

By 2014 Falceto said he kept at least three working bands, in the United States, France and Ethiopia, and the French Badume's Band toured with him for more than ten years. In January 2013 he played the MONA FOMA festival in Hobart and Arts Centre Melbourne with the Melbourne Ethio-jazz band The JAzmaris, and he returned to Melbourne with them in 2017. He appeared with Marcus Samuelsson in the Ethiopia episode of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown in 2015. France admitted him to the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in July 2016, and that October he played Carnegie Hall.

Farewell

He announced his retirement at the Sheraton in Addis Ababa on 1 November 2024, with a biography by the journalist Wossen Debebe in preparation. The farewell concert, on 11 January 2025 at Millennium Hall, marked some sixty years of singing, and former President Sahle-Work Zewde was in the audience. Fans arrived from four in the afternoon, and he walked on with a cane at about 1:35 in the morning. Capital Ethiopia judged the night badly organised. Days before, he had told The Continent that he would be happy to die on that stage.