I’ve spent a good amount of time in Europe with The Ex, Getachew Mekuria, and Melaku Belay (one of the best dancers I’ve ever seen), but seeing these videos of them bringing it in Ethiopia last week adds a whole new level of intensity & multi-faceted awesomeness to their ongoing project.
“Oleyo” – Kat sings in Amharic at an Addis music school, she’s turning into a star
I love the infectious careening space created here, dancers and musicians and crowd going up and up, plus Melaku and the audience guy’s Ethio-popping and locking:
So that was a new, very interesting situation: playing to exactly one person instead of DJing to the kinetic volume of a dancing crowd. And that one person liked the cumbia/afro-colombian stuff. After several songs a few more people joined in (not that there were more than 15 or 20 of us) – by the end even Kat was dancing, and Afework Negussie the masenqo player kept passing me tunes from his mp3-thingy to blend in. That night became a strange, reassuring, ego-free ‘open secret’ afterparty in the heart of Flemish country, where our contingent reality was not only possible but present, embodied, aglow.
Sometimes you play a big rave-type event and you make a bag of money but it feels spiritually vacant. Sometimes you play for a handful of people and you don’t simply ‘strike a chord’ as we say in English, you find yourself within one.
