Citizen Azmari. Ilana Webster-Kogen
to Africa, Rada’s cover of the song engaging a set of pan-African ideologies that connect her to African American musical vernaculars through their mutual exchange.
The Ethiopian state began to incorporate foreign musical influence from 1924, when Haile Selassie (then regent rather than emperor) brought the Arba Lijotch, a brass band of forty Armenian orphans from Jerusalem, to Addis Ababa. Once brass instruments were introduced, the musical climate of the capital changed quickly, with military bands presenting new repertoire to the public (see Falceto 2002). Within a few decades, Ethio-jazz emerged as a local example of a trend sweeping Sub-Saharan Africa: incorporation of African American musical styles framed as a “return to Africa” inspired by blue notes and political solidarity. According to Francis Falceto, the period of 1960–1974 (when Haile Selassie was overthrown) was a “golden era” for Ethiopian cosmopolitanism and cultural production, with the music scene in Addis Ababa one of the liveliest on the continent thanks to the emperor’s patronage.
The proponents of African fusion forms, like Fela Kuti in the case of Afro-beat (see Waterman 1998), crisscrossed the routes of the black Atlantic—London, New York, and Lagos, eventually transmitting across Africa. In the process they produced syncretic styles that in turn influenced music in the United States in the repertoire of jazz and funk musicians, reaching Addis Ababa in the 1960s. Ethio-jazz is distinctly local, borrowing from the modal system of Azmaris (qignit) and from folk repertoire, but its style stems from cultural processes whereby Ethiopia connected itself to the African diaspora through music. The vernacular of jazz, which incorporated the same instrumentation as the marching band, propelled hybridity based on Western instrumentation and song structure along with Ethiopian melodic lines and Amharic lyrics.
During the Derg period of military rule (1974–1991) following the overthrow of the emperor, the Ethiopian music industry virtually closed down because of (among other factors) a curfew in Addis Ababa and strict border controls (Shelemay 1991). In that period Francis Falceto, working with Buda Musique, rereleased albums by beloved Ethiopian musicians from the regional traditions of the Gurage, Amhara, and Tigray people. The result, now known as Éthiopiques, continues to produce traditional and paraliturgical musical, but the modal, brassy sound of Swinging Addis is still the main Ethiopian musical export today.
At the Madison Square Park concert in New York (June 2014) as at the Rich Mix in London (July 2015), Rada closed the show with “Nanu Ney.” The version adhered closely to her version on the album, which, at under four minutes, is shorter than both her Nina Simone covers and the original by Muluken Melesse. But rather than include it in a medley as she often does in-concert for other covers, she sang the entire song, dancing a makeshift Ethiopian shoulder dance (Eskesta) between the verses, to which the audience responded ecstatically. After presenting a repertoire in New York with a heavy American influence, she concluded by reminding the audience of her African origins.
Rada’s rendition of “Nanu Ney” hews closer to Melesse’s version than her other covers do to their sources. Rather than incorporate her band’s syncretic style, her version follows Melesse’s song structure, including nearly identical instrumentation (rock band plus brass section), meter (6/8 that can be counted or transcribed equally as 4/4), and tonality (modal, heavy on tritones and minor seconds). The band has transposed the song upward by a major second, cut the synthesizers, and reduced the ensemble size, but these modifications still leave the song close to the 1970s version. The band’s adaptations mostly incorporate Afrodiasporic techniques: the string section makes use of funk elements including the wah-wah effect, while the brass section plays slightly after the downbeat (creating subtle syncopation), and handclaps punctuate the introduction.
Meanwhile, singing Melesse’s lyrics about “unfinished business” between estranged lovers in the verses, Rada incorporates minimal ornamentation, retaining the low-pitched and smooth timbre from her other repertoire. The scale provides most of the vocal contrast: each line of verse begins with Rada ascending by a perfect fourth, and then singing the rest of the line on the fourth. In an extended verse of twelve lines, she does this eight times followed by a bridge, where she sings the guitar’s opening motive. Instead of imitating the melismatic Ethiopian vocal style, she does not add improvisation, vibrato or grace notes to her performance. Indeed, her most explicit punctuation is her pronunciation of the explosive letters ጨ (ch’ä) and ጰ (p’ä) in Amharic, the trilled ረ (rä), and the vowel እ (ë). The emphasis on Amharic pronunciation over vocal ornamentation makes sense, since one of Rada’s main achievements in this song (as she told me) is to introduce the Israeli public to an Amharic song.
The Israeli public had heard this song before, in a heavily mediated format. In 2005, the multiethnic Israeli mega-band the Idan Raichel Project—Israel’s closest analogue to Paul Simon’s Graceland—used “Nanu Ney” as the opening to the title song from the album Mima’amakim. I examine the song of the same name in detail in chapter 3, arguing that it conveys a nationalist (Israeli) agenda by drawing on the musical conventions of Israeli popular song. A Zionist interpretation of the song partly hinges on the fact that Raichel, the bandleader, samples the opening, without incorporating Ethio-jazz tonality into the full song. For Raichel’s fans, a mix of Israeli progressives and world-music fans in the United States and Europe, the Ethiopian section offers a bit of ethnic flavor to a pop song, such that in-depth treatment of tonality (modal), instrumentation (brassy), or lyrics (Amharic, dealing with heartbreak) need only be glossed schizophonically (Feld 1996).
That Rada chose this among Ethio-jazz standards to cover can perhaps be read as a commentary on “Mima’amakim” (Audio file 8) and its selective sampling of particular Ethiopian sounds. As the only Amharic song on her album, one that she renders faithfully with minimal arrangement, the song feels like a corrective to the Idan Raichel Project’s more cannibalistic approach to the classic song.
Rada’s perspective is different, though. When I interviewed her, she explained the choice in some detail:
ER: I think it happened when I heard an Amharic song for the first time on Israeli radio. To hear an Amharic song on Israeli radio … here, Idan Raichel did something really nice, because there was never anything like this in Israel. And I got quite emotional, and went to hear the original song. And I loved it. And I thought that someone had to do the original. Because it’s an amazing song. Not to do, like that to Idan Raichel [makes a stabbing motion] …
IWK: You do the whole song, and you dance, and the audience loves it.
ER: That’s what I wanted. It’s something that the audience knows, and a lot of people think that Idan Raichel wrote the song, so I wanted people to know that it’s an Ethiopian song, that it has an origin, that it’s a complete song, even that’s a good [outcome] in my opinion. And people have really liked it. It’s been on the radio a lot in Israel. It’s the first time a full Ethiopian song has been on the air in Israel. (interview, Jaffa, March 5, 2015)
Rada explains that she did indeed intend to correct misperceptions, but her concern was for Israelis to recognize and acknowledge Ethiopian culture. She notes that a listener might (as I did) interpret the song as a dig against Raichel, but she rejects that interpretation. The primary outcome in covering this song is to reconfigure its symbolic meaning for an Israeli public and, for Ethiopian-Israelis, to connect their source material to her Afrodiasporic source material.
This version of “Nanu Ney” can claim several accomplishments. Rada delivers an iconic African sound to an Israeli audience, turning a schizophonic product (“Mima’amakim”) into a part of Israel’s tapestry of ethnic origins (edot).21 The source material itself, though, carries the history of the African diaspora, of blackness, and of pan-Africanism in the postcolonial moment. Whether or not the song fits neatly into the black Atlantic discourses of musical exchange, the amount of cultural negotiation that went into producing it—from the proto-Rastafarian political speeches of Marcus Garvey to the syncretic jazz-funk of Miles Davis—has turned “Nanu Ney,” and a good deal of Ethio-jazz, into a part of the reawakening of black pride. For this song to be the choice of Israel’s first black star works in tandem with the American-influenced source material to create a lineage that connects blackness from New York to Addis Ababa, via