Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument

Having settled in Addis Ababa at the age of 10, Hailu Mergia had grown up on traditional Oromo, Amhara ,and Tigrinya songbook melodies, and taught himself the accordion at age 14.[2] His mastering of the accordion, as well as the keyboard and his talent for "re-purposing folk songs into funkier modern melodies," defined his contribution to popular music in Ethiopia.[2] In the 1970s, Hailu Mergia was the keyboardist in the Walias Band, an Ethiopian jazz and funk band with a hard polyrhythmic funk sound influenced by western artists like King Curtis, Junior Walker ,and Maceo Parker. In the period, it was harder for working bands in the region to make a living, after Mengistu's Derg government-imposed breaks to Addis Ababa's nightlife, but the music was still being regularly recorded, and cassettes were the typical release format, given they were easy to duplicate and distribute.[3]

Due to the Derg dictatorship, censorship was often a problem for the area's musicians, but Mergia acknowledged one way around censorship was to only create instrumentals. He later noted: "When you sing or write lyrics you have to support the government, and if you don’t do that then you have a problem."[2] Ethiopian music was typically led by a vocalist, and fewer than five instrumental albums were released during the 'golden age' of Addis' music, one of which by was one of Mergia's landmark albums with the Walias Band, Tche Belew (1977). As a side project, Mergia joined the Dhalak Band around this period and recorded the cassette-only Wede Harer Guzo (1978) with them, a jazz-infused album with a dominance of improvisation.[2] Mergia's organ work for the band was one of the Walias Band's key characteristics, but during a 1980s tour of the United States, Mergia and several other members decided to stay in the US, effectively ending the band's career, although their legacy in Ethiopia was strong by this point, especially via their 1977 instrumental "Muziqawi Silt."[3]

It was only several years after moving to the US that Mergia recorded a new album, Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument, in 1985, during which point he was playing with the Zula Band.[4] Hailu recorded the album alone in a small studio.[5] The studio belonged to an acquaintance that Mergia met at Howard University, where he had begun studying music, and the impetus for the album was picking up an accordion, an "instrument he hadn't touched in decades."[6] Mergia said his initial plan for the album was to "just record [some] accordion for myself, just to listen," but he ditched the plan when he "couldn't keep his hands off" the small studio's Rhodes electric piano and DX7 synthesiser too.[6] He recorded the eleven, largely improvised tracks that make up the album in three days.[6]

Mergia mailed the master recording of Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument to the Addis Ababa record label Kaifa Records, who released it on cassette in Ethiopia in 1985,[6][13] with a cover that depicts Mergia half-smiling while surrounded by keyboards.[4] The album was a surprise success in the country,[5][6] and Ethiopian people phoned Mergia to ask him "What is this music?".[6] Nonetheless, Mergia's output had always been and continued to be widely unheard of outside of Ethiopia.[2] Following the album's release, Mergia faded into relative obscurity.[14] While he continued to play parties, restaurants ,and weddings with the Zula Band, the band broke up in 1992 or 1993 and he stopped playing live gigs at this point, mostly retiring from music.[4]

In January 2013, Brian Shimkovitz, founder of Awesome Tapes from Africa (an American label which reissues obscure African cassettes for a Western market), stumbled across a copy of Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument in a music shop in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia, whose staff let him listen to many of the cassettes on sale.[4] Shimkovitz "freaked out completely" when he heard it and listened to it twice in a row. He recalled: "It sounds like no other Ethiopian music I've heard. Analogue synths, a simple drum machine and accordion (and no vocals)."[15] Hoping to re-release the album on his label, he set out to locate Mergia by Googling him, being surprised to quickly find his mobile number.[4][15] By this point, Mergia had been working as a taxi driver in Washington for 10 years.[16][17] He was very interested in working with Shimkovitz on the re-release.[15]

Awesome Tapes from Africa subsequently re-released Hailu Megia & His Classical Instrument on 25 June 2013 in the United States as a CD, LP, cassette and download.[18] Shimkovitz said that the re-release "sold very well" and wrote that "people all over the world have responded positively" to the album's unusual style.[15] It was with the re-release that Mergia's output became better known to the wider world.[2] Having not played live for some 20 years, Mergia missed touring,[4] and the album's re-release caused the 67-year-old musician to wonder what performing music outside his Washington home would be like.[6] Nonetheless, the success of the album's re-release allowed Mergia to relaunch his international touring career.[15] Mergia built a friendship with Shimkovitz,[15] and following the success of the re-release, Awesome Tapes from Africa re-released two more Mergia albums, 1977's Tche Belew (an instrumental jazz album by Mergia and the Walias Band) in 2015 and the 1978 cassette Wede Harer Guzo in 2016.[12] Mergia's first album of new material since 2003, Lala Belu, was released on the label in February 2018.[12]

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
The List	[10]
MSN Music (Expert Witness)	A−[19]
Pitchfork	7.4/10[3]
Tom Hull	A−[20]

Praise greeted Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument in the West following its 2013 re-release.[15] Joe Tangari of Pitchfork was favourable, calling the album's sound "difficult to describe." He wrote: "The music is simple and straightforward, accomplished but not showy. It feels at once rural, nostalgic, and futuristic. Replace the drum machine with people clapping, and you’d be a hair’s breadth from an ethnographic recording."[3] Daniel Spicer in The Wire called the album "a prescient yet ancient sound that proposes a unique kind of Ethio-Kosmische."[12] Writing for MSN Music,[19] Robert Christgau gave the album an A− score,[9] indicating "the kind of garden-variety good record that is the great luxury of musical micromarketing and overproduction. Anyone open to its aesthetic will enjoy more than half its tracks."[21] Stewart Smith of The List called the re-release "another gem" from the Awesome Tapes from Africa label, and complimented the album's dreamy, blessed-out sound.[10]

Chris Richards of The Washington Post recalled how the cassette "meshed the sound of a forgotten folk instrument with strange, futuristic timbres" and called it an album "that simultaneously pointed toward Ethiopia’s musical past and future."[6] In 2015 The Irish Times named the album a "Sunken Treasure" and called it "a deeply progressive meditation on something historical and personal. The hypnotic tunes are soothed by occasional flourishes of gentle songcraft from a voice so warm it could have been stirred up on some savannah breeze aeons ago."[8] Jon Pareles of the New York Times wrote: "With the unswerving patterns from the drum machine, the music came across as an eerie, isolated rumination on a place and time Mr. Mergia had left behind, with its Ethiopian modes and melodies transplanted to a modern terra incognita."[5] Fact Magazine later ranked the album at number 5 on their list of "The 50 best reissues of 2013," where they called it "serpentine Ethiopian jazz" which "trades in the usual folk instruments for big fat beefy synth leads. Comfort food, prime for scoffing."[22]

The album captured the point in which Ethiopian music shifted away from acoustic-based performances and more towards recordings incorporating an increasing amount of synthesised elements. While this general shift in the country's music was criticised by some, Mergia's initial experimentation with instrumental, "switched-on" solo reinterpretations of Ethiopian folk and popular music contributes what Shimkovitz called "a singular feeling dripping in ambiance and a very human emotional energy."[7] April Clare Welsh of Fact Magazine called it "a vital document of Ethiopian musical history."[2] By the time of the album's re-release, synthesizers and drum machines had become common instruments within Ethiopian pop music, albeit in a different fashion than that on His Classical Instrument. Tangari felt one of the aspects which separates the Mergia album from other Ethiopian music "is the fact that it was made in solitude, and specifically out of longing for a vanished past. It's introverted in a way very little other music from the country is. It's also not quite like anything else you’ve ever heard."[3] Shimkovitz calls the album "one of my all-time favourite tapes."[15]

• Hailu Mergia – accordion, keyboard, electric piano, drum machine