Kenneth Joseph

Hailu Mergia: Yene Mircha

by Chris May
March 9, 2020

While Mulatu Astatke is the musician most widely associated with the creation of Ethio-jazz, fellow keyboardist Hailu Mergia is among other significant figures. Astatke is best known overseas because he was the most outward looking of Ethio-jazz's first generation, studying at London's Trinity College of Music and Boston's Berklee College of Music and making his first records in New York in 1966. Mergia by comparison has always looked in the main to Ethiopian traditional music for vocabulary and form. In ...