Listen to Debo Band and Fendika

Two seasons ago, Boston’s Debo Band first brought their interpretations of classic 1960s and 70s Ethiopian music to Crossroads. Shortly afterwards, they travelled to Addis Ababa to perform at the 8th Ethiopian Music Festival and several other locations throughout the Horn and East Africa. These performances affected Debo Band’s creative and professional development in significant ways, particularly in the collaboration they began with several traditional musicians – vocalist Selamnesh Zemene, drummer Asrat Ayalew, and dancers Zinash Tsegaye and Melaku Belay. When working with these four musicians Debo Band grows into a forceful, energetic, and authoritative fourteen-piece ensemble capable of delightful, one-of-a-kind performances.

Ethiopian-American jazz saxophonist Danny Mekonnen, a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at Harvard University, founded Debo Band in 2006 as a way of exploring the unique sounds that filled the dance clubs of “Swinging Addis” in the 1960s and 70s. Danny was mesmerized by the unlikely confluence of contemporary American soul and funk music, traditional East African polyrhythms and pentatonic scales, and the instrumentation of Eastern European brass bands. Ethiopian audiences instantly recognize this sound as the soundtrack of their youth, carried from party to kitchen on the ubiquitous cassette tapes of the time. And increasingly, erudite American and European audiences are also getting hip to the Ethiopian groove, largely through CD reissues of Ethiopian classics on the Ethiopiques series – not so coincidentally, some of the same people who are behind the Ethiopian Music Festival in Addis.

Debo Band draws audiences from both mainstream America and Ethiopian American communities. They have opened for legendary Ethiopian greats such as Tilahun Gessesse and Getatchew Mekuria, who has lately been collaborating with Dutch punk veterans The Ex. Debo’s unique instrumentation, including horns, strings, and accordion, is a nod to the big bands of Haile Selassie’s Imperial Bodyguard Band and Police Orchestra. Their lead vocalist, Bruck Tesfaye, has the kind of pipes that reverberate with the sound of beloved Ethiopian vocalists like Mahmoud Ahmed and Alemayehu Eshete. Although Debo Band is steeped in the classic big band sound of the 1960s and 70s, they also perform original compositions and new arrangements along with more contemporary sounds such as Roha Band and Teddy Afro.

With a powerful female vocalist, an exciting male and female dance duo, and a propulsive traditional goat-skin drummer, Debo’s Ethiopia-based collaborators Fendika add the vibrancy of Addis Ababa’s nightlife to Debo Band’s distinctive take on Ethiopian dance music. All accomplished musicians in their own right, these musicians work together at Fendika, a leading azmari bet, or traditional music house, operated in Addis Ababa by Melaku Belay, Ethipia’s top dancer with more than 40 international concerts in the last three years, including performances at Chicago’s Millennium Park and New York City’s Lincoln Center. One of the most active artists on the Addis Ababa scene today, Melaku is an ardent supporter of Ethiopia’s diverse musical traditions and a savvy cultural entrepreneur who manages his own nightclub and is developing his own institute for the arts.