New film sheds light on the Ethiopian music phenomenon

Check out the trailer for the documentary Ethiopiques – Revolt Of The Soul which you can stream right here. 

Ethiopiques – Revolt Of The Soul is the story of the phenomenon of a unique music style which had a considerable influence on late 20th Century free jazz and pop music. Local musical traditions meet Western rock n' roll and soul, and fantastic music is the result in 1960s Ethiopia, where music was otherwise forbidden.

James Brown is shouting and screaming from the loudspeakers. People have gathered in front of the record store in Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa, and they are completely transfixed. When the day is over, all the records have been sold.

In the 1960s, a visionary Ethiopian imported records from all over the world, and was the first person to produce Ethiopian music, even though it was forbidden by the government. The groovy, beat-driven and almost hypnotising soul-jazz music made its way into the listeners' ears and hypnotised them.

The film shows how people danced in the streets until the day when a coup threw the country into civil war, and musicians were forced to escape from Ethiopia together with their music. This could have been the end of Ethiopian music history, but as fate would have it, a record fell into the hands of a French music enthusiast, who gave the genre a bustling afterlife with the critically acclaimed 32-record album series 'Ethiopiques'.