My initial encounter with jazz wasn’t through the polished grooves of a record, but within the untamed energy of a novel by Adam Reta. Though the title now escapes me, the essence of jazz was presented as a raw, fragmented force, mirroring the disjointed realities of the characters. This literary introduction framed jazz not as a rigid genre, but as a vibrant chaos—a refusal of fixed narratives—akin to the restless spirit of my generation’s aesthete perspective or art-elite sentiment. In moments of personal uncertainty, this portrayal offered solace: a reminder that linearity wasn’t mandatory, and the future remained open. 

However, this abstract understanding found visceral grounding within the walls of the African Jazz Village in Addis Ababa. It was there, in the hush of a Tuesday evening, that I first heard Ethio-jazz. Seated on a simple stool, the soulful cry of a saxophone plunged headlong into the ancient pentatonic scales of Ethiopia, supported by the warm tones of a Fender Rhodes, filling the air. The track—Mulatu Astatke’s classic Tezeta from Éthiopiques Volume 4—struck with immediate and intense impact. The word “Éthiopiques,” once a fleeting mention in obscure blogs, blossomed into a tangible experience, evoking a nostalgia for a past I’d never known—a melancholic warmth settling within me. 

African Jazz Village became a sanctuary, the Éthiopiques playlist the soundtrack to nascent recollections. With each visit, the gravitational pull of the music intensified. The distinctive voices of Mahmoud Ahmed, the melodic artistry of Tilahun Gessesse, the guttural saxophone of Getatchew Mekurya, and the innovative sounds of Teshome Mitiku created a sound-world where jazz felt remapped—never to be confined by ordinary American rules again. Its rebellion was not merely a rejection in the context of Western social norms, but a reclaiming of time and rhythm, as expressed through Amharic phrasing and Ethiopian rhythmic complexity. Ethio-jazz became intensely personal: the soundtrack to my own unravelling—and eventual reconstruction. 

A fundamental resonance of jazz—particularly Ethio-jazz—lies in its dismantling of static identity. Listening to Mulatu Astatke’s “Yèkèrmo Sèw” and “Motherland” felt like witnessing sonic deconstruction. The unpredictable unfolding of the music, through fragments and unexpected collisions that ultimately cohered, mirrored my own exploration of identity in a fluid, ever-shifting world. Jazz, at its core, is an art of reinvention—a spirit of constant evolution that defines the modernist ethos. My generation, much like jazz, resists the passive acceptance of inherited identities, choosing instead to challenge, rearrange, and reinterpret them in light of our lived experiences. 

Mulatu Astatke’s genius lies not only in the fusion of Ethiopian rhythms with jazz improvisation, but in embodying a powerful artistic response to globalisation—a sonic manifestation of cultural exchange and adaptation. This transcended mere music, symbolising cultures and histories in constant flux, creatively recombining in innovative ways. Ethio-jazz was not simply a deconstruction of Ethiopian tradition, but a vibrant reimagining that gave it a global voice within jazz’s established framework. This mirrors contemporary art trends that value conversation, interaction, deconstruction, and surprising synthesis. 

Experiencing the Éthiopiques series felt like glimpsing a fractured past—intimately familiar, yet perpetually out of reach. Perhaps this unattainability is the music’s power, resonating with my own struggles with identity during moments of personal uncertainty. 

This ethos of dynamism is echoed in the music of Feven Yoseph, a compelling new voice in modern Ethio-jazz. Her art reflects the searching, experimental nature of my generation, in which identity is as much a point of discovery as a stable state. Her music, recalling my first literary experience of jazz, weaves unpredictability with mastery—raw, spontaneous power with subliminal structure. Feven navigates genre boundaries, fusing ancient Ethiopian sounds, jazz improvisation, and modern electronic textures into a constantly evolving, wordless language that even breaks free from itself. Jarring shifts in tone and rhythm mirror the shifting expectations of contemporary art, immersing listeners in Ethiopian grooves one moment before surprising them with electronic flourishes the next. This disorientation—thrilling in its execution—reflects the cultural and personal complexities of the new millennium, transforming jazz into a profound philosophy: a sonic exploration of constant becoming. 

Experiencing the Éthiopiques series felt like glimpsing a fractured past—intimately familiar, yet perpetually out of reach. Perhaps this unattainability is the music’s power, resonating with my own struggles with identity during moments of personal uncertainty. This sensation deepened upon encountering Professor Yirga Gelaw’s concept of “native colonialism,” articulated in his book Native Colonialism. Gelaw analyses the colonial legacies embedded within Ethiopian identity, revealing how imposed fractures and borrowed frameworks often underpin the modern Ethiopian self. In this light, jazz—and particularly Ethio-jazz—emerges as a powerful sonic metaphor for the tension between ancestral memory and imposed modernity, between local roots and global perspectives, between tradition and rebellion. It acts as a form of “noise produced by memory”: a vibrant counterpoint to the silenced epistemologies of old Ethiopia. 

Professor Yirga’s analysis highlights how “native colonialism” in Ethiopia—despite the nation’s unique history of non-colonisation in the traditional sense—led to the internalisation of colonial logic within educational and cultural spheres. This resulted in the suppression of indigenous knowledge systems in favour of European paradigms, disempowering traditional Ethiopian ways of knowing, languages, and spiritual practices. Ethiopian jazz—particularly the groundbreaking work of Mulatu Astatke—is an act of resistance against this internalised colonisation. It does not function as a reproduction of African-American sounds, but as a necessary reawakening of Ethiopian sensibilities, articulated through a universal musical language. 

Astatke’s genius lies in adapting, not abandoning, Ethiopian musical structures—stretching the jazz idiom over the five-note qenet modal scales, and demonstrating the coexistence and hybridisation of diverse systems. This offers a quiet yet powerful critique of colonial power dynamics. His improvisation can be understood as “memory work”: a refusal of wholly imposed structure and a retrieval of lost possibilities, mirroring the fragmented process of remembering an identity partially erased. 

remembering one's origins – zemene (era), Ye'zer Hareg' (lineage ), qeni'e (poetic voice) – is itself an act of resistance in a world that often devalues non-Western forms of knowledge and expression. 

A presentation, the contemporary work of artists like Jorga Mesfin complicates and enriches this lineage, layering glitch, field recordings, and electronic textures into the Ethio-jazz frame. Their sound builds from simple fusion into intentional fracture, resisting easy clarity, and, to my mind, achieving a more radical engagement with the Ethiopian sonic archive in the contemporary end. This resonates with the idea that remembering one's origins – zemene (era), Ye'zer Hareg' (lineage ), qeni'e (poetic voice) – is itself an act of resistance in a world that often devalues non-Western forms of knowledge and expression. 

Ultimately, beyond the sound, lies the truly enduring beauty of jazz: it mirrors the existential uncertainties of modern life, and it captures the feeling that identity is fluid and the world inherently ambiguous. Ethio-jazz, in particular, exemplifies this constant process of reinvention. Each note embarks on a quest for the new, the unknown. This agitational energy—this counter-conformity—calls most urgently to a generation torn between nostalgic pining and the necessity of forging an unprecedented future. 

Jazz, as I’ve come to understand through the pioneering sounds of Mulatu Astatke, Tesfa-Mariam Kidane, and the transformative Éthiopiques series, is more than music; it is an approach to being—an acceptance of our fragmented existence in a disjointed world. It embraces the unresolved, celebrates rupture, and crucially resists the urge for simplistic resolution. Whether encountered in the evocative prose of a novel or within the vibrant atmosphere of African Jazz Village, jazz offers a profound permission: to be uncertain, to bend the constraints of time, to embrace dissonance without the immediate need for harmony. It reminds us that sometimes the music we truly need is not the kind that defines who we are, but the kind that gently suggests we don’t need to know just yet.