TILAYE GEBRE - Tilaye’s Saxophone With The Dahlak Band

In Africa’s second most populous country, having such a tight-knit musical scene surrounding the recording industry, it seems as if the movers and shakers were largely in each other’s phone books

Oh, I wouldn't make it that simple. It's true that the bands of the Ethiopian golden age often shared members, but tracing who played where is more of a maze than it seems. The family tree might branch out like this: in the Ibex Band (later Roha Band) we find Selam Seyoum and Giovanni Rico; in the Walias Band, Hailu Mergia and, briefly, Mulatu Astatke; in the Dahlak Band (formerly Equators), Dawit Yifru (also in Roha) and Tilaye Gebre (also in Walias). The heavyweight division of ethio-jazz, in short.

Those were the years straddling the post-war optimism of the empire's final phase and the totalitarian nightmare of the Derg, when the drive for progress of the Selassié era gave way to Mengistu's regime of terror. The privileged setting for that revolutionary music was the hotels of Addis Ababa, above all the legendary Ghion (still home today to the Addis Jazz Festival, one of the world's great jazz events). Performances that became legend, as documented by a stack of cassettes recorded rigorously in a single take ("one microphone at the front, hit record: no EQ, no reverb, just some delay"), proof of the enormous professionalism of these pioneers, as visionary in their experimentation as they were flawless as entertainers.

A fixture on that stage, the Dahlak Band shaped the "Ghion sound" like no other group, and the credit goes above all to bandleader Tilaye Gebre. A precocious talent trained at the prestigious Hailé Selassié I Theatre, by 17 his sax was already in demand around town. From then on he established himself as the ultimate go-to session player of the local scene, collaborating among others with the golden-voiced Muluken Melesse on the epochal "Muluken Melesse With The Dahlak Band", released in 1976 by the historic Kaifa Records and one of the masterpieces of Ethiopian music as a whole.

Joining the Walias Band and a fortunate tour of the United States, where he would decide to settle, cemented once and for all the reputation of his unmistakably vibrato-laden reed, which in the meantime had also forged a fruitful partnership with another national hero, Mahmoud Ahmed. The rise of the Derg pushed "unpatriotic" music into semi-clandestinity, but Tilaye and his band didn't back down — quite the opposite, hitting back with an ingenious trick: to get around the curfew banning movement in the streets after midnight, they staged monster sets stretched out until first light, so as to keep the audience inside the concert halls. Only musicians of immense skill and exceptional stamina could pull off a feat like that.

Meanwhile, cassettes recorded during those nights circulated through the underground: brimming with languid tizita (the Ethiopian equivalent of Brazilian saudade), they became the dreamlike soundtrack of an idealized Ethiopia, one that finally found the chance to resurface in 1991 with the fall of the dictatorship. Carrying over fifty years of career with all the grace typical of Ethiopia, Tilaye is still going strong, and in these very days he'll be taking the stage at the Addis Jazz Festival, sharing the bill with lifelong friends.

Despite their popularity at home and abroad, these recordings are anything but easy to find, having attained the status of rare groove. The Muzikawi label is working to bring them back into circulation, keeping a privileged watch over the local archival heritage from its headquarters in Addis Ababa.

After the wonderful reissues of recent years dedicated to Dawit Yifru and the Ibex Band, this time it's the turn of Tilaye and his horn, by turns smooth ("Ālibek'agnimi") or hypnagogic ("Tizita"), equally at ease in the dub of "Ānichī keto gidi yeleshimi" or the blues of "Ālichalikumi", right through to the tense jazz-rock of "Tizi ālegni yet'initu", not before the 10 ecstatic minutes of "Eyut sitinafik'egni". And listening to this hour of pure class, it's not hard to picture yourself at a table at the Ghion, lost in the scales of this iconic jazz made in Ethiopia.

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11/02/2026