Ethiopiques, the series that put Ethiopian music back in circulation

In April 1984 a friend came back from Addis Ababa with a Mahmoud Ahmed LP. Francis Falceto heard it and reacted the way everyone reacts the first time: what is that.

He borrowed the record, made cassettes off it, passed them around music journalists who were as startled as he was, and the following month he got on a plane to Ethiopia.

In 1986 a Mahmoud Ahmed record came out in Europe, on Crammed Discs in Brussels, with Falceto behind it. It was the first release abroad of modern Ethiopian music.

So far this is the story of a lucky enthusiast. The part that matters comes later, and it is a story about paperwork, heirs and boxes.

The masters were in Athens

In November 1987 Falceto went to Washington to close a licensing deal with Amha Eshete, the Ethiopian producer who held the rights to most of that music from the sixties and seventies.

The deal did not close. Amha was in exile and had none of the documents needed to trace the records that had been manufactured, or the tapes.

It took the fall of the Derg and Amha’s return home for the search to start again in earnest. Telling it later, Falceto put the word in quotation marks: the “holy” masters.

The day of February 1997 when I could go to Athens and get back these pieces of Ethiopian heritage has been one of the happiest day in my life, truly.

The Amha Records masters were there, in Greece. In October 1997 the first CD in the Ethiopiques series came out on Buda Musique.

Twelve records, then twenty-seven

Falceto had a dozen volumes in mind, no more.

Then other people came looking for him: Ali Tango of Kaifa Records, whom he had known since his first trip to Ethiopia, and Tilahun Gessesse himself, which he remembers as another happy day.

By 2012 there were twenty-seven volumes out, with a stated aim of reaching thirty-four or thirty-five and closing the job. The scope of the series is Ethiopian music between 1950 and 1975, which is where the Addis Ababa scene ends for political reasons.

Listen while you read

The original recordings had been produced by Amha Eshete and others between the late sixties and the early seventies, in a period of relative openness that ends in 1974.

The work you do not see

A reissue looks like a simple act: take the tapes, clean them, press them. Falceto lists what sits in between, and the list is the most instructive part of the whole story.

It takes perseverance and endurance, he says, and probably some masochism.

On the commercial side he is just as direct: there is a huge gap between press coverage and the actual market, and it is a niche market, which some people in Ethiopia find hard to believe.

Not everyone is happy about it. Falceto talks openly about suspicion and accusations: a foreigner spending decades on that heritage has drawn its share of ill will.

His answer is the least heroic and most honest part of the story. He did it because he could not see anybody else, Ethiopian or foreign, intending to do it, and he would gladly have bought a ready-made series put together by someone else.

What is left

Twenty-seven volumes and counting, and a generation of listeners who met Mulatu Astatke, Mahmoud Ahmed and Tilahun Gessesse through a run of French CDs with identical sleeves.

We lined them up one evening to work out whether that identical artwork held a series or just a catalogue. Volume twenty-one is a solo piano record by Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru: that fits inside the same sleeve too.

A reissue is not a neutral act. It decides what becomes available again and what stays in the box, and somebody decides it, with a name and an address.