Unsung heroes of Ethiopian pop music.from @nts_radio

Transcript

Architects of Ethiopian pop's golden age. The sound of Ethiopian pop and jazz from the nineteen sixties and seventies is unmistakable. Like many other places, the history of Ethiopian music is long and tier, but this specific era is frequently referred to as its golden age. The biggest proponents of this sound have sold millions of records, toured around the world, and introduced wider audiences to Ethiopian music more broadly. But the key figures behind this sound are often forgotten. Enter bassist Giovanni Rico and guitarist Salam Waldemariam. They were the creative backbone of the Ibex bad and later tier Roja bad. Inspired by better sounds like Motown and The Beatles, the band created a unique backing for the vocalists they worked with. First, they built the musical backdrops for Mahmud Ahmed, who shot to fame with the now iconic album Ira Mela Mela. They provided the service to a who's who of Ethiopia's so called golden age, sculpting sonic worse for Astraweke, Molatu Yastake, and many more. They were present on the TV screens of Ethiopia as backing bad for some of the earliest televised musical performances in the country. As the Best rank and the Roja band, they recorded thousands of songs in the seventies and eighties, many of them uncredited, hard to find, or lost to time entirely. But arguably their most important work still survives, nineteen seventy six's Tier Instrumental Music. The album, which presents the instrumental genius of the Best bad without vocals, is somewhat of a Rosetta Stone for many Ethiopian musicians. Songs recorded in just a couple of hours in a hotel ballroom under the tight deadline of a national nightly curfew became the purest form of a sound beloved around the world. Listen back to an Ibex bad special on NTS.