Mulatu Astatke Boomerang

When a boomerang is released into the sky, it makes a giant loop and comes back to its original location. This is the phenomenon that inspired the boomerang hypothesis applied to many different genres of popular music from the continent of Africa. For some African countries and its people, the boomerang was released during the slave trade. Not until slavery was abolished did the boomerang finally return to its origin. For other African countries, the boomerang was flung out much later, during the periods of colonization in the 19th and 20th centuries. Via newly formed travel lanes by European colonizers, the boomerangs were able to explore the western continents of Europe and North America and return to Africa with novel sounds, instruments, and techniques. A fusion of western music and traditional African music was imminent.
In the horn nation of Ethiopia, a boomerang was being readied. Its name was Mulatu Astatke. Astatke would bring to the forefront of the Ethiopian music scene a fusion style never heard before. Astatke would father the newfound genre of Ethio-Jazz, the first musical genre to truly fuse together traditional Ethiopian music and western sounds. However, the trajectory that Astatke would take would be far different from that of other boomerangs that left Africa. The trajectory that Astatke would take would set apart modern …show more content…
His music reflects the blues and soul of traditional jazz, the liveliness of Latin music, the traditional instrumentation and tone of Ethiopia, and countless other fused qualities. It is easy, almost imminent, that one gets carried away into his music. In his popular piece Yegelle Tezeta, which he wrote and performed for the award winning film Broken Flowers starring Bill Murray, he displays his instruments as the voice, the expresser, of the song. The following table is a break down of Yegelle Tezeta by