Mulatu Astatke

Jazz musician and composer Mulatu Astatke is one of our era’s great musical innovators and has long been considered the father of Ethio jazz. With this long-awaited return, he concludes this year’s Selam Festival.

When he was in his 20s, Mulatu Astatke travelled from his homeland of Ethiopia to Wales with the intention of studying to become an engineer. But he soon changed both subjects and continents, and studied music instead in London and New York, becoming the first African musician to graduate from Berklee College of Music in Boston.

Astatke formed the foundation of his unique sound by crossing Western harmonics with scales that are characteristic of the Ethiopian music tradition. When he later moved to New York, he expanded his musical expressiveness through inspiration from African American music, jazz and Latin American rhythms. In the late 60s, Astatke recorded three albums in the US with Puerto Rican musicians, records which are currently frequently played and hotly coveted among vinyl collectors.

He returned to Addis Ababa with a unique familiarity with American jazz, which not only resulted in several now legendary solo albums, but also a music scene that was brand new at the time in Ethiopia. Based on Mulatu as an icon, in the early 70s a musical convergence of Western funk and jazz with East African melodies was created – and Ethio jazz was born.

Mulatu Astatke tours and performs Ethio jazz all over the world to sold-out concert venues, and the performance in Stockholm will be one of the highlights of Selam Festival Stockholm!

In cooperation with Selam, opens in a new window