I’ll buy all 21 of Buda Musique’s excellent Ethiopiques series in one fell swoop.
Last Friday DJ John Staub (Tufts econ prof, I think) played an hour of selections from the series on Test Pattern, and it was all quite excellent. He’s posted some annotations here:
What Buda Musique is dubbing “The Golden Era of Modern Ethiopian Music” came in the waning years of Emperor Haile Sellassie’s reign. Sellassie was Ethiopia’s emperor before and after the Italian occupation under Mussolini (1935-1941). (Many Rastafarians also believe that Sellassie is/was God incarnate, although Sellassie himself practiced Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity). A 1948 Imperial decree made it illegal to privately produce or import records in Ethiopia, but in 1969, a 24-year-old businessman named Amha Eshete created his own label called Amha Records. From 1969 to 1975, Amha released 103 45s and a dozen LPs. “I thought, nobody’s going to kill me for this,” he said years later.
The golden era ended in 1974 when a millitary junta deposed Sellassie and actually enforced its own repressive policies. Record production dropped literally to zero by 1978.
[...]
Interesting stuff.