Mulatu Astatke

London, Boston, New York

Mulatu Astatke was born in Jimma in 1943 and sent to Britain at sixteen to study engineering. After school in Wales he turned to music at Trinity College in London. He played Soho clubs with African and Caribbean musicians and worked with the bandleader Edmundo Ros. In 1963 he went to Berklee in Boston, its first African student, to study vibraphone and percussion.

In New York in 1966 he met the producer Gil Snapper and recorded Afro-Latin Soul for the Worthy label with his Ethiopian Quintet. He took the four modes of Ethiopian music, as he put it, and on top of them built the world: pentatonic scales with jazz harmony and Cuban rhythm. He named the music Ethio-jazz.

Swinging Addis

Back in Addis Ababa in 1969 he worked mainly as an arranger for Amha Eshete's Amha Records, the country's first independent label, which in six years made about a hundred and twenty singles and fourteen albums. His own instrumentals came out as singles and on Ethiopian Modern Instrumentals Hits and Yekatit Ethio Jazz in 1972; in New York the same year he recorded Mulatu of Ethiopia with Latin session players. He hosted Duke Ellington's orchestra on its visit to Ethiopia and played with them at the Addis Hilton.

In 1974 the Derg junta took power, Amha Eshete fled, and the music scene closed down. Mulatu stayed, taught, played vibes on Hailu Mergia's Tche Belew (1977) and later studied in Havana.

Rediscovery

In the 1990s the French producer Francis Falceto found Amha Eshete and restored the master tapes. In 1998 Buda Musique devoted the fourth volume of its Ethiopiques series to Mulatu, the first given to a single musician. Jim Jarmusch heard it, and in Broken Flowers (2005), which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, Bill Murray's character drives across America to a CD of Mulatu's music. As Tampere Jazz put it, the film gave the final push to an international career.

Since then he has recorded with the Boston Either/Orchestra, the London band the Heliocentrics on Inspiration Information (2009) and Melbourne's Black Jesus Experience. Strut's 2009 retrospective New York-Addis-London was a Pitchfork Best New Reissue. He spent 2007 and 2008 as a fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute, working on a modernised krar and an opera on Ethiopian church music, and founded a music school and the African Jazz Village club in Addis Ababa. Nas and Damian Marley built As We Enter on Yegelle Tezeta.

Farewell

Berklee gave him an honorary doctorate in 2012 and France the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2019. In 2024 he recorded Mulatu Plays Mulatu at RAK Studios in London and in Addis, which he called the culmination of his work bringing this music to the world. A farewell tour of Europe ran through autumn 2025, ending at the Royal Festival Hall, though he was back there in June 2026 for Meltdown.