I'm Clyde Macfarlane, an NCTJ qualified journalist and illustrator.

Interview with Samuel Yirga

Last month saw the release of Dub Colossus’s Addis Through the Looking Glass, a complex, sophisticated and critically acclaimed experiment in Ethiopian jazz. The band drew inspiration from a variety of modern genres, giving accessibility to an ancient musical tradition. With this experimentation comes a loss of purity, however; as a newcomer to Ethiopian Jazz, the listener could come away ignorant of how the genre is defined. Step forward Samuel Yirga, Dub Colossus’s 25 year old keyboard player.

“I believe that my country’s music is unique and deserves to be kept alive”, he tells me. A key creative force behind the fusion of Dub Colossus in one role, a campaigner for traditionalism on the other; Yirga is becoming something of a prodigy for Ethiopian music.At the age of 16 he competed against almost 2,500 others to win a place at Addis Ababa’s prestigious St Yared Music Conservatory. His solo album, Hagere, is a piano driven expression of the latter role.

“I mostly play a traditional Ethiopian style mixed with 20^th century Ethiopian jazz. I initially took a classical music course, but I changed because I was always more interested in playing jazz. The scales and the modes of Ethiopian music are really spacious and accommodating- it’s an easy transition.”

What makes traditional Ethiopian music so unique?

“There is a very special scale in Ethiopian music called anchihoy. There are four major Ethiopian scales- tezeta, bati, ambassel and anchihoy. Anchihoy is perhaps the most unique. The spacious intervals between the notes are unusual, and for this reason theanchihoy scale was never used when musicians played for tourists. In traditional Ethiopian music it works because our melodies, wedding songs and church songs are all based on the anchihoy scale.

Making the anchihoy scale forbidden kept its purity. No Europeans studied this kind of Ethiopian music. It should have been experimented with more, but people didn’t think at had much commercial value. From the time I was in school, I’ve been trying to experiment with anchihoy. I’m still doing it; even though I play R&B and pop, my main interest is with traditional music.”

Why is it such an important time for Ethiopian music?

“There has been a huge growth of music schools in Ethiopia. Ten years ago there were one or two, but now there are many- you can study Western jazz, Ethiopian jazz and classical music. Another reason is that some Ethiopian musicians living in America have moved back to Addis. This is a big inspiration for the city’s growing musical talent. One such musician played with me at Womad- his name is Henok Temesgen, and he plays bass. In my opinion he is one of the most inspiring people for Ethiopian music, and that’s why I wanted him on stage with me.”