Addis Through The Looking Glass

Dub Colossus

Released 24 April 2011

  1. Addis Through The Looking Glass
  2. Dub Will Tear Us Apart
  3. Wey Fikir
  4. Yeh Shimbraw Tir Tir
  5. Tringo Dub
  6. Satta Massagana
  7. Kuratu
  8. Feqer Aydelem Wey
  9. Guragigna
  10. Yezema Meseret
  11. Yigermel
  12. Wehgene
  13. Uptown Top Ranking
  14. Gubeliye

Liner notes

The aim, says Nick Page, the musician and producer best-known as Dubulah (also a founding member of Transglobal Underground and Syriana), is to constantly surprise. The new Dub Colossus album, Addis Through The Looking Glass, does just that. It’s a new departure in the band’s remarkable history.

Dubulah first travelled to Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa in 2006 to collaborate with musicians and explore traditional Azmari styles, 60s Ethiopian pop, Ethiojazz and 70s Jamaican Dub Reggae. There he came across some amazingly talented artists, including female vocalists Tsedenia Gebremarkos, a fine, soulful performer and highly successful African pop star, and Sintayehu ‘Mimi’ Zenebe, who runs a nightclub in Addis and has been described as ‘Ethiopia’s Edith Piaf.’ Add in the extraordinary young pianist Samuel Yirga, veteran saxophonist and jazz exponent Feleke Hailu, and Teremage Woretaw, a traditional Azmari folk singer and master of the one-stringed messenqo violin… and Dub Colossus was born.

When their first set, A Town Called Addis was released in 2008 it was hailed as one of the most inventive fusion albums of the year, with its blend of contemporary and traditional Ethiopian styles, jazz and dub reggae. Addis Through the Looking Glass is a more lengthy, even more varied and sophisticated album that moves the experiment on —with the Ethiopian contingent playing a greater role in the proceedings. It’s still an experimental fusion set, not a straightforward recording of Ethiopian songs, but the successes of the years between recordings led to growing trust and confidence within the band.

This time they were saying to me ‘we’d like to show you our take on it, rather than you interpreting us’, explains Dubulah. It was a good exchange. They would come up with the subject matter and ideas for the next phase of the group. And I’d transport some of their ideas into another world.

As with the first album, recording took place mostly in Addis Ababa, where local musician Abiyou Solomon, who plays bass on the album, lent the band a room in his house to use as a studio.  It was brilliant —there were three cupboards which we could use as vocal booths, or put the horn section. It all worked well, apart from the sound of rain on the roof— the rain hits very hard in Addis.

There were further sessions in the UK, where another set of musicians became involved. They include the reggae singer Mykaell Riley, famous for his work with Steel Pulse, Jamiroquai’s drummer Nick Van Gelder, the Horns of Negus brass section, bass work from Dr Das of the Asian Dub Foundation, and double bass from Bernard O’Neill, who works with Dubulah in the Arabic-influenced Syriana. As for Dubulah himself, he played guitar, bass, harmonicas and keyboards, produced the set, and co-wrote several of the songs.

The result is an album that constantly surprises and constantly changes direction, from atmospheric, wide-screen, drifting jazz-dub instrumentals like the title track, to breathy love songs from Tsedenia, and bluesy traditional pieces featuring the messenqo fiddle or traditional krar harp, now treated to a Dub Colossus make-over, with spacey, microtonal keyboard effects added on the otherwise sparse Yigermel. For Dubulah, it’s a beautiful song that reminds me of someone sitting on a hillside at night up in Gondar, in the north of the country, looking up at the sky with a fire going. I’ve got traditional recordings of the track, but there was no point in just providing a traditional Ethiopian Azmari album.

Songs like Kurt, a soulful, thoughtful piece about the sometimes secretly dominant role played by women in Ethiopia, sung by Tsedenia, showcase the inventive piano work of Samuel Yirga, whose solo album, produced by Dubulah, was later released on Real World— a superb mix of Ethio-jazz, solo piano and soul. Guragigna, a live show favourite, which features lead vocals by Mimi, is a ferociously funky Ethiopian song which sounds like a blue taxi going at full speed with no brakes during rush hour in Addis Ababa.

Then there’s reggae, of course, from the jazzy, brass-backed ‘Dub Will Tear Us Apart’ to the gently sturdy Wehgene, featuring Mimi’s sister Tiruedel. There are also two Ethiopian-flavoured re-workings of great Jamaican reggae classics. Satta Massagana, originally recorded by The Abyssinians in 1976, is now treated to lyrics in both English and Amharic, with fine brass work from the Horns of Negus, while Althea and Donna’s Uptown Top Ranking, a number one hit in the UK two years later, is given a similar multi-lingual treatment. It’s a song that proved massively popular in the UK during the band’s live shows, and Dubulah was naturally keen to record it though Tsedenia was the only one of the Ethiopian musicians who had heard it before.

'Uptown Top Ranking', performed live at The Dingwalls

Mixed in with all this there’s one other key influence: the jazz styles that became so important during the ‘golden era’ of Ethiopian music back in the 1960s and early ’70s; music that is now rightly popular among Western fans, following the success of the Ethiopiques compilations from the period. This was the time of Emperor Haile Selassie, a fan of brass ensembles and jazz— though not the reggae so beloved of the Rastas who deified the ageing ruler! —when some of the country’s greatest players could be heard performing with the Police or Army Band, or the Imperial Bodyguard Band. It was a music scene that collapsed during the repression of the Mengistu regime, when many musicians fled to work in the West, but is now recovering. For twenty years there were no brass sections in Addis, says Dubulah, but now a whole new jazz-flavoured live scene has emerged there.

One of the best new horn sections are the Bole Better Brass, session players who regularly work with Feleke Hailu and Samuel Yirga in Addis, and can be heard on two tracks here. They are featured on a driving instrumental treatment of Feqer Aydelem Wey, an instrumental treatment of a song by the Ethiopiques star Ayelew Mesfin, and again on the album’s final track, Gubeliye. Written first by Feleke, who adds an assortment of different brass and reed instruments, and then finished by Dubulah, this is a driving piece that’s very different to anything else on the album, an experimental “soundtrack to the madness of Addis” that mixes big band styles and dub, with sturdy brass work matched against an equally sturdy bass line.

It provides a powerful ending to a set that marks yet another landmark in the colourful and wildly varied career of Dubulah, whose interest in reggae started when he played in a school reggae band in Hackney, east London. Since then he has “spent time trying to be an avant-garde composer and failing miserably, living in a squat in Stepney with one cold water tap and large rats”, before working with reggae star Mykaell Riley “so I went from trying to sound like Bartok to playing in the style of the Mighty Diamonds, Black Uhuru and Steel Pulse!”. He moved on to form Transglobal Underground with Tim Whelan and Hamid Man Tu, recording six albums with these world music mavericks, famous for mixing beats with a wide array of global influences, before leaving to form Temple of Sound with Neil Sparkes. Along the way he became a prolific producer, working with the likes of Natacha Atlas.

Dub Colossus may have started out as a studio-based project, but have proved that they are also a rousing live band known to transport audiences to the sultry clubs and pounding dancehalls of Addis Ababa with their intriguing and exuberant mix of traditional Ethiopian sounds, sturdy reggae rhythms and a modern dub twist. Their sound is simultaneously familiar yet fresh, with echoes of such diverse influences as The Abyssinians, Sun Ra, Tlahoun Gesese, Pablo Gadd, Hirut Beqele, Dick Dale and King Tubby.

Listen

Reviews

  • Nick Page, aka Dubulah, creates wonderfully lush and evocative soundtracks to films that don't exist. From the jazzily atmospheric title track to an Abyssinian folk take on Uptown Top Ranking, this takes you on a widescreen journey through a pleasantly edgy Ethiopia of the mind. The Telegraph (UK)
  • Simmering, jazzy horn arrangements, uncomprising vocals from Sintayehu "Mimi" Zenebe and Mykael Riley and the insistent pulse of the rhythm section combine to mesmerising effect. The Sunday Times (UK)
  • One of Afropop Worldwide's top ten albums of 2011 Afropop Worldwide
  • An intriguing combination of Reggae and dub and ethiopian music masterminded by Dubulah Jazzism (Netherlands)
  • The driving and edgy Guragigna, with sturdy vocals from Mimi Zenebe and the African R&B instrumental track Feqer Aydelem Wey, featuring the Bole Brass, are updated reminders of the golden era of Ethiopian music in the 1960's...jazz-edged piano work of the brilliant young Samuel Yirga. An intriguing inspired set. The Guardian (UK)
  • Well-crafted, passionately felt, and highly recommended... Who would have thought, when Ethiopiques launched in 1997, that Ethiopian music would come up to bump like this, going on 15 years later? All About Jazz (US)
  • "Ethopia coming through!" indeed. An even more cohesive and enjoyable mix of dub reggae, jazzy would-be movie music and Éthiopiques-style funk and balladry. The Independent (UK)

Further Listening

  • A Town Called Addis

    Dub Colossus

    Released 12 October 2008

    Dub Colossus collaborate with some of Ethiopia's finest performers. Utilising Azmari and traditional styles as well as the popular singing styles of the 60s and 70s the album seeks to combine the golden years of Ethiopique beats and Ethiojazz with the dub reggae styles of early 70s groups like the Abyssinians and the Mighty Diamonds.
  • Never Trust A Hippy

    Adrian Sherwood

    Released 24 February 2003

    Never Trust A Hippy is Adrian Sherwood's eclectic, compelling, and lovingly crafted solo debut. "It's a logical marriage," Sherwood says. "I was thinking about myself in conjunction with the bulk of what Real World has done. It's my own version of a kind of world music-sci-fi-dub-dancehall record, made contemporary by using such great people as Sly and Robbie, Lenky, Jazzwad and Bubblers."

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