WHEN PEOPLE TALK about Mahmoud Ahmed, there are typically three prevailing descriptions: legendary, a national treasure, and the godfather of Ethiopian music. Yonnas Yilma breaks it down in terms any ...

Left: Ayalew Mesfin [Photo by Hannah Brooks]. Right: Hailu Mergia [Photo courtesy of the artist] For many people outside of the Habesha community, their first experience with Ethiopian music came from ...

ONSTAGE 68-year-old Mulatu Astatke is as subtle and understated as the Ethiopian jazz he created. The music, a hybrid of traditional Ethiopian music and jazz, is subdued, somewhat melancholy, and at ...

Jamaica and Ethiopia have long-standing cultural ties. Rastafarians believe that the late Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie was actually the second coming of the Messiah, and since the 1970s, reggae ...

In 1997, Buda Musique, a French record label, launched “Éthiopiques,” a multivolume CD series that collected songs from Ethiopia’s golden age of pop music—an era that began in the late sixties and ...