Addis

Born in Addis Ababa in 1970 and growing up in Sweden, Lemma has been making music since his teens but is a new name to these pages, for until now he has worked predominantly in a mainstream pop-soul vein. For this album, he went back to the city of his birth to record with Ethiopian musicians and the result is a unique and rather thrilling kind of fusion. His voice and songs draw on classic 1960s/1970s American R&B but here they’re accompanied by the Ethiopian krar or lyre, the single-string masenqo (lute), flute and other traditional instruments, while Abegasu Shiota on keyboards, bassist Henock Temesgen and guitarist Girum Mezmur prove equally adept in Ethiopian and western styles as the album switches back and forth between the two. The swinging ‘Fendika (feat Nardos Wude Tesfaw)’ and ‘Pass It On’ boast terrific western pop-soul melodies on which the influences of Curtis Mayfield and Donny Hathaway are self-evident. On the other hand, ‘Gonder’, which features the keening voice of Nardos Wude Tesfaw, is steeped in Amharic tradition and sounds like it might be a thousand years old while the organ-heavy ‘Ketema Taxi’ could have wandered in from one of Francis Falceto’s Éthiopiques compilations. Somewhere in between, songs such as ‘Mountain Rose’ and ‘Wede Addis Ababa’ miraculously combine the two.