The century old traditional house of Dejazmach Ayalew Emiru is to be handed over to Liya Kebede, a super model residing in New York. Feleke Yimer, deputy general manager of the city, has, on June 2, 2008, instructed the city Housing Development Project Office to furnish condominium housing to 24 head of households who are currently occupying the building.
The decision to grant the historical house to Liya was made by Berhane Deressa, former mayor of the city, during his last days in office. The house is located in Kirkos District, Kebele 02/03, behind the Cameroon Embassy off Africa Avenue (Bole Road).
“The one-storey building is not in a good form now,” says Worku Ambaye, who has been staying in the house since 1974. “Rain leaks into the house. It is because I have no better option that I am living here with four of my children.”
Every household has a single or two rooms. Although the house was initially put up with lumber, the residents have been overhauling it with corrugated iron sheets.
What are considered as historical relics in the city master plan are 33 churches, two mosques, 73 houses of former chiefs, 2 institutions, and 17 monuments, trenches and bridges.
The city has plans to outsource such houses to private investors that would like to use them as galleries, hotels or exhibition and bazaar spots. Thus, Dejazmach Ayalew’s was granted to the famous Ethiopian model. Dejazmach is a military title meaning commander of the central body of traditional Ethiopian armed forces. Dejazmach, who died forty years ago, was the leader in the fight against Italy.
Liya’s plan is to revamp the houses a bid to make it a hub for tourists, according to those who were exposed to her proposal.
Liya was born and raised in Addis Abeba. While she was attending Lycee Guebremariam, she was introduced to a French modeling agent. After completing her studies, she moved to France to pursue work through a Parisian agency. She later relocated to New York City. For her 2.5 million dollars earning in July 2007, Forbes named her the eleventh in the list of the world’s 15 top earning models.
http://www.addisfortune.com/New%20York%20Based%20Ethiopian%20Model%20to%20Revamp%20Historical%20Relic.htm
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Chris Tucker to make a movie in Ethiopia
ENA) — The famous American Actor, Chris Tucker is thinking to do a movie in Ethiopia, his favorite African country where he considers as “a second home”.
The actor who was among more than 200 delegates who paid a two-day visit to Ethiopia before heading to Arusha, Tanzania, for the 8th summit of Leon H. Sullivan Foundation transplanted tree in Ethiopia on Friday.
Chris Tucker told ENA on the spot that “Hopefully, I can come back and do a movie. I have to figure out.”
He said “I love Ethiopia. It is my favorite African country. Because of the history… it is just beautiful and the people are beautiful and nice.”
He said “I am happy to be here, this is like my second home.”
“Hopefully I can come back in a year or two …and just show that Ethiopia has so much beautiful greenery. This is a great, great flourishing land.”
“This is my second time (to be in Ethiopia). I am looking forward to coming back. On my first time, I didn’t go out the countryside. Today we went out a little further out. And see beautiful trees and hills. That was really nice,” he said.
Another member of the delegation, CB Hackworth, is also planning to come back to Ethiopia on a film documentary project on Ethiopia.
He said he wanted to stopover before heading to Arusha for a number of reasons, one of which is because he “…wanted to have some meeting here to discuss the possibility of doing a film here in Ethiopia.”
“What we do … is we tell positive stories about Africa,” he said.
According to him, what people outside of Africa know about the continent is what they are told by the media. Mostly, he said, the international media make Africa look a bad place, which he observed is not the true story of Africa.
“People in the US don’t realize they can visit a beautiful city like Addis that there are wonderful hotels and it is peaceful, that they are safe, if people come to know this then they will visit. And it will increase tourism and help the economy. So that is what we are trying to do with the film.”
“We are trying to find positive stories,” he said adding, the initiative of Ethiopia to replenish its lost forest resources in connection with its millennium celebration, which he considers as a wonderful way of marking the millennium, is a positive story.
He said “… News is something happening. For large news organizations, they don’t rush out and spend money and resources to report good things are happening. They rush out and spend money and resources to tell you about a war or a famine. If things are going good they generally don’t consider that news. We are trying to bring some balance to that and say there is more to the world. There is more to Africa.”
“Ethiopia is very civilized. Ethiopia also fought against colonialism. So unlike a lot of parts of Africa, Ethiopia really was able to put its own imprint on its own country. So a lot of your developments are from Ethiopians. So I think that is unique, I think that is something that people who visit will find very interesting,” he said
The actor who was among more than 200 delegates who paid a two-day visit to Ethiopia before heading to Arusha, Tanzania, for the 8th summit of Leon H. Sullivan Foundation transplanted tree in Ethiopia on Friday.
Chris Tucker told ENA on the spot that “Hopefully, I can come back and do a movie. I have to figure out.”
He said “I love Ethiopia. It is my favorite African country. Because of the history… it is just beautiful and the people are beautiful and nice.”
He said “I am happy to be here, this is like my second home.”
“Hopefully I can come back in a year or two …and just show that Ethiopia has so much beautiful greenery. This is a great, great flourishing land.”
“This is my second time (to be in Ethiopia). I am looking forward to coming back. On my first time, I didn’t go out the countryside. Today we went out a little further out. And see beautiful trees and hills. That was really nice,” he said.
Another member of the delegation, CB Hackworth, is also planning to come back to Ethiopia on a film documentary project on Ethiopia.
He said he wanted to stopover before heading to Arusha for a number of reasons, one of which is because he “…wanted to have some meeting here to discuss the possibility of doing a film here in Ethiopia.”
“What we do … is we tell positive stories about Africa,” he said.
According to him, what people outside of Africa know about the continent is what they are told by the media. Mostly, he said, the international media make Africa look a bad place, which he observed is not the true story of Africa.
“People in the US don’t realize they can visit a beautiful city like Addis that there are wonderful hotels and it is peaceful, that they are safe, if people come to know this then they will visit. And it will increase tourism and help the economy. So that is what we are trying to do with the film.”
“We are trying to find positive stories,” he said adding, the initiative of Ethiopia to replenish its lost forest resources in connection with its millennium celebration, which he considers as a wonderful way of marking the millennium, is a positive story.
He said “… News is something happening. For large news organizations, they don’t rush out and spend money and resources to report good things are happening. They rush out and spend money and resources to tell you about a war or a famine. If things are going good they generally don’t consider that news. We are trying to bring some balance to that and say there is more to the world. There is more to Africa.”
“Ethiopia is very civilized. Ethiopia also fought against colonialism. So unlike a lot of parts of Africa, Ethiopia really was able to put its own imprint on its own country. So a lot of your developments are from Ethiopians. So I think that is unique, I think that is something that people who visit will find very interesting,” he said
Thursday, May 1, 2008
The golden age of Ethiopian music
For 17 years, Addis Ababa resounded to African rhythms, Western pop, and European band music. Now that heady mix is coming to the UK. By Andy Morgan
Let's compare two snapshots of recent Ethiopian history. The first is from 1968, when Emperor Haile Selassie I ruled over the proudest and most eccentric nation in Africa, with its Christian Coptic church (that was already well established when the British still worshipped pagan gods), its feudal menagerie of princes, barons and serfs, its vast and verdant central plateau, and its pulsating capital city Addis Ababa, which was then one of the pre-eminent cultural, social and diplomatic hot-spots of independent Africa.
At this time, down in the Wube Bereha, the red-light district of central Addis, royalty rubbed its haughty shoulders with generals and gigolos, bar-room philosophers and peace-corps workers, diplomats and prostitutes, in an intoxicatingly illicit celebration of youth and freedom. Plush hotels resounded to patent-leather-clad feet dancing to the sounds of resident "soul" combos like the Ras Band, All Star Band, Zula Band, Venus Band, Wabe Shebele Band, Roha Band and Dahlak Band. The old guard fumed against youthful decadence and the unwelcome "foreign" influences that seemed to be invading the nation's cerebral cortex. The old order was dying, and those who could either afford or blag their way into the party were dancing like tomorrow would never come.
Fast-forward a mere 17 years to 1985 and the headlines were monotonously brutal: famine, corruption, Eritrean separatists, Live Aid, Bob Geldof, Stalinism African-style, starving children and flies crawling across the face of a desperate nation. Francis Falceto, a young music promoter from Poitiers in France, stepped nervously off an Aeroflot flight from Moscow and into the dark, empty streets of Ethiopia's capital, which had been cleared of all joy and nightlife by the midnight curfew imposed in the wake of the revolution of 1974.
The "swinging" Addis of the late 1960s had become a ghost-town populated by bristling armed patrols and legions of stray dogs. Fear and suspicion reigned supreme. The merest human initiative required a rubber stamp, a visa, a nod from the appropriate apparatchik or minister. Falceto had given himself one week to find two giants of the golden age of modern Ethiopian music – the singer Mahmoud Ahmed and the composer-arranger Mulatu Astatqe – and bring them back for a tour of France. The meetings happened, but the mission failed. It would take many more trips and years of research and frustration before Falceto could begin opening the ears of the world to Ethiopian music.
The tragic discrepancy between these two images of Ethiopia, and the urge to re-establish a just equilibrium between them, is at the heart of Falceto's 20-year-old devotion to the country and its music. Sitting in a hotel room in Camden Town hours before receiving a 2008 BBC Award for World Music for Ethiopiques, his epic CD reissue series, the Frenchman explains his motives while chain-smoking. "Until recently I couldn't start an article or interview without first trying to put things right. Now, I feel that I've spoken enough on that particular subject and that what you can hear or see through the Ethiopian music of that era is like a plea for us to revise the vision we have of that country."
Quite apart from breaking the simplistic bond that has yoked Ethiopia and famine together in the popular imagination, Ethiopiques has won numerous awards, scored a world music hit with its recent Very Best of Ethiopiques release, corralled a cosmopolitan fanbase and revived the careers of some of the leading lights of the golden age, which lasted a mere decade and a half from 1960 to the mid-1970s.
Ahmed is now an A-list attraction on the global-music circuit, saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya has penetrated new musical realms and audiences thanks to his collaboration with Dutch impro-punks the Ex, and the ubiquitous Astatqe travels the world, basking in the adulation of fans of leftfield jazz such as Gilles Peterson, who played host to him at a recent day of gigs and workshops at London's Red Bull Academy.
Now all three along with the singer Alèmayèhu Eshèté will be reunited to perform in a concert - their first ever together outside Ethiopia - in London next month. The 23 beautifully packaged and annotated CD volumes in the series have achieved something that even the Ethiopians themselves believed would never happen.
"When I first met Mahmoud Ahmed in Addis," Falceto explains, "he couldn't imagine, and Ethiopians in general couldn't imagine, that their music could appeal to foreigners. It took years and years of touring in the West for them to accept that non-Ethiopians could swing, groove, jump and love this music."
Cultural isolationism is a natural product of Ethiopia's unique history and geographical location. High up on their lush green plateau, Ethiopians have enjoyed a spiritual and political independence that has lasted thousands of years and was sullied only briefly by Mussolini and his delusions of imperial grandeur in the 1930s.
The earlier victory of Emperor Menelik and his general Ras Makonnen over the Italians at the battle of Adwa in 1896 brought diplomats and bounty-hunters from all over the world to the Imperial court. It also prompted the Tsar of Russia, impressed by the fierce resistance of this ancient Christian kingdom to European colonialism, to donate a full set of brass-band instruments along with the services of a Polish bandleader by the name of Milewski to Emperor Menelik. This is largely how an unorthodox love of European orchestral music was injected into the Ethiopian bloodstream.
By the 1950s, every imperial institution of note, from the army, the police and the imperial bodyguard to the Haile Selassie Theatre, had its own orchestra, comprising scores of disciplined musicians who enjoyed the tutelage of dedicated foreign bandleaders, such as the Austrian Franz Zelwecker or the Armenian Nerses Nalbandian. But it was only after the failed putsch of 1960, in which the imperial bodyguard and its orchestra were heavily implicated, that the strictly regimented system of institutional bands started to crumble and smaller, hipper, funkier groups began to forge a new sound that was both brazenly modern, with a sonic approach broadly synchronised to the soul, jazz and funk that spanned the globe, and resolutely Ethiopian at the same time.
Listen to any of the Ethiopiques CDs, but especially The Very Best Of... or Volume 1: the Golden Years of Modern Ethiopian Music, and this essential quality of alien familiarity hits you from the first note. It's as if Falceto stumbled on a kind of modern musical equivalent of the Galapagos Islands, where inbound musical species, immune to the Latin American, Arabic or Asian influences that dominate the rest of Africa's musical landscape, mutated into strange and wonderful hybrids, executed with a level of musicianship that could stand alongside the best in the West. The quavering vocal style of Muluqen Mellesse, Teshome Meteku, Seyfou Johannes or Alemayehu Eshete, and sparse jagged arrangements of Astatqe or Girma Beyene all provoke the same reaction in the receptive novice:" What on Earth is this?"
"There's nationalism, even at times a chauvinism that borders on the xenophobic, in the Ethiopian spirit," explains Falceto, "and it predates the colonial era by many hundreds of years. You feel that in the music. An Ethiopian will never slap you on the back and say, 'OK, mate, how's it going?' They look down at you and think, 'OK, if you're here it means that things are better than where you come from'. I find that very impressive, but it means that it's sometimes hard to work with them."
The payback for Falceto's obsessive perseverance has come not only in the shape of the international success of Ethiopiques but also the hard-earned respect of Ethiopians both at home and abroad, who have rejoiced in the reversal of the cultural surgery performed by Colonel Haile Mengistu Mariam and his Stalinist Derg regime after the revolution. Ethiopians in their fifties or sixties finally have hard evidence with which to convince their children and grandchildren that their homeland really did achieve musical greatness.
Ethiopiques in concert, 27 June, Barbican, London (020 7638 8891; www.barbican.org.uk) 'The Very Best of Ethiopiques' is out now
Let's compare two snapshots of recent Ethiopian history. The first is from 1968, when Emperor Haile Selassie I ruled over the proudest and most eccentric nation in Africa, with its Christian Coptic church (that was already well established when the British still worshipped pagan gods), its feudal menagerie of princes, barons and serfs, its vast and verdant central plateau, and its pulsating capital city Addis Ababa, which was then one of the pre-eminent cultural, social and diplomatic hot-spots of independent Africa.
At this time, down in the Wube Bereha, the red-light district of central Addis, royalty rubbed its haughty shoulders with generals and gigolos, bar-room philosophers and peace-corps workers, diplomats and prostitutes, in an intoxicatingly illicit celebration of youth and freedom. Plush hotels resounded to patent-leather-clad feet dancing to the sounds of resident "soul" combos like the Ras Band, All Star Band, Zula Band, Venus Band, Wabe Shebele Band, Roha Band and Dahlak Band. The old guard fumed against youthful decadence and the unwelcome "foreign" influences that seemed to be invading the nation's cerebral cortex. The old order was dying, and those who could either afford or blag their way into the party were dancing like tomorrow would never come.
Fast-forward a mere 17 years to 1985 and the headlines were monotonously brutal: famine, corruption, Eritrean separatists, Live Aid, Bob Geldof, Stalinism African-style, starving children and flies crawling across the face of a desperate nation. Francis Falceto, a young music promoter from Poitiers in France, stepped nervously off an Aeroflot flight from Moscow and into the dark, empty streets of Ethiopia's capital, which had been cleared of all joy and nightlife by the midnight curfew imposed in the wake of the revolution of 1974.
The "swinging" Addis of the late 1960s had become a ghost-town populated by bristling armed patrols and legions of stray dogs. Fear and suspicion reigned supreme. The merest human initiative required a rubber stamp, a visa, a nod from the appropriate apparatchik or minister. Falceto had given himself one week to find two giants of the golden age of modern Ethiopian music – the singer Mahmoud Ahmed and the composer-arranger Mulatu Astatqe – and bring them back for a tour of France. The meetings happened, but the mission failed. It would take many more trips and years of research and frustration before Falceto could begin opening the ears of the world to Ethiopian music.
The tragic discrepancy between these two images of Ethiopia, and the urge to re-establish a just equilibrium between them, is at the heart of Falceto's 20-year-old devotion to the country and its music. Sitting in a hotel room in Camden Town hours before receiving a 2008 BBC Award for World Music for Ethiopiques, his epic CD reissue series, the Frenchman explains his motives while chain-smoking. "Until recently I couldn't start an article or interview without first trying to put things right. Now, I feel that I've spoken enough on that particular subject and that what you can hear or see through the Ethiopian music of that era is like a plea for us to revise the vision we have of that country."
Quite apart from breaking the simplistic bond that has yoked Ethiopia and famine together in the popular imagination, Ethiopiques has won numerous awards, scored a world music hit with its recent Very Best of Ethiopiques release, corralled a cosmopolitan fanbase and revived the careers of some of the leading lights of the golden age, which lasted a mere decade and a half from 1960 to the mid-1970s.
Ahmed is now an A-list attraction on the global-music circuit, saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya has penetrated new musical realms and audiences thanks to his collaboration with Dutch impro-punks the Ex, and the ubiquitous Astatqe travels the world, basking in the adulation of fans of leftfield jazz such as Gilles Peterson, who played host to him at a recent day of gigs and workshops at London's Red Bull Academy.
Now all three along with the singer Alèmayèhu Eshèté will be reunited to perform in a concert - their first ever together outside Ethiopia - in London next month. The 23 beautifully packaged and annotated CD volumes in the series have achieved something that even the Ethiopians themselves believed would never happen.
"When I first met Mahmoud Ahmed in Addis," Falceto explains, "he couldn't imagine, and Ethiopians in general couldn't imagine, that their music could appeal to foreigners. It took years and years of touring in the West for them to accept that non-Ethiopians could swing, groove, jump and love this music."
Cultural isolationism is a natural product of Ethiopia's unique history and geographical location. High up on their lush green plateau, Ethiopians have enjoyed a spiritual and political independence that has lasted thousands of years and was sullied only briefly by Mussolini and his delusions of imperial grandeur in the 1930s.
The earlier victory of Emperor Menelik and his general Ras Makonnen over the Italians at the battle of Adwa in 1896 brought diplomats and bounty-hunters from all over the world to the Imperial court. It also prompted the Tsar of Russia, impressed by the fierce resistance of this ancient Christian kingdom to European colonialism, to donate a full set of brass-band instruments along with the services of a Polish bandleader by the name of Milewski to Emperor Menelik. This is largely how an unorthodox love of European orchestral music was injected into the Ethiopian bloodstream.
By the 1950s, every imperial institution of note, from the army, the police and the imperial bodyguard to the Haile Selassie Theatre, had its own orchestra, comprising scores of disciplined musicians who enjoyed the tutelage of dedicated foreign bandleaders, such as the Austrian Franz Zelwecker or the Armenian Nerses Nalbandian. But it was only after the failed putsch of 1960, in which the imperial bodyguard and its orchestra were heavily implicated, that the strictly regimented system of institutional bands started to crumble and smaller, hipper, funkier groups began to forge a new sound that was both brazenly modern, with a sonic approach broadly synchronised to the soul, jazz and funk that spanned the globe, and resolutely Ethiopian at the same time.
Listen to any of the Ethiopiques CDs, but especially The Very Best Of... or Volume 1: the Golden Years of Modern Ethiopian Music, and this essential quality of alien familiarity hits you from the first note. It's as if Falceto stumbled on a kind of modern musical equivalent of the Galapagos Islands, where inbound musical species, immune to the Latin American, Arabic or Asian influences that dominate the rest of Africa's musical landscape, mutated into strange and wonderful hybrids, executed with a level of musicianship that could stand alongside the best in the West. The quavering vocal style of Muluqen Mellesse, Teshome Meteku, Seyfou Johannes or Alemayehu Eshete, and sparse jagged arrangements of Astatqe or Girma Beyene all provoke the same reaction in the receptive novice:" What on Earth is this?"
"There's nationalism, even at times a chauvinism that borders on the xenophobic, in the Ethiopian spirit," explains Falceto, "and it predates the colonial era by many hundreds of years. You feel that in the music. An Ethiopian will never slap you on the back and say, 'OK, mate, how's it going?' They look down at you and think, 'OK, if you're here it means that things are better than where you come from'. I find that very impressive, but it means that it's sometimes hard to work with them."
The payback for Falceto's obsessive perseverance has come not only in the shape of the international success of Ethiopiques but also the hard-earned respect of Ethiopians both at home and abroad, who have rejoiced in the reversal of the cultural surgery performed by Colonel Haile Mengistu Mariam and his Stalinist Derg regime after the revolution. Ethiopians in their fifties or sixties finally have hard evidence with which to convince their children and grandchildren that their homeland really did achieve musical greatness.
Ethiopiques in concert, 27 June, Barbican, London (020 7638 8891; www.barbican.org.uk) 'The Very Best of Ethiopiques' is out now
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