Erè Mèla Mèla

Mahmoud Ahmed grew up in Addis Ababa's Mercato district, left school with little education and worked as a shoeshiner before taking a job as a handyman at the Arizona Club, the after-hours hangout of Emperor Haile Selassie's Imperial Bodyguard Band. One night in 1962 the band's singer did not turn up, and Mahmoud asked if he could sing a few songs. He stayed in the lineup until 1974 and became one of the great voices of the Addis Ababa golden age, recording for the Amha and Kaifa labels. The emperor's overthrow and the military government's curbs on nightlife changed everything. The bodyguard band was gone, and by 1978 censorship pushed Mahmoud from vinyl to cassettes; in the 1980s he ran a music shop in the Piazza district. But the records he had cut with the Ibex Band in the mid-1970s, including the LP Erè Mèla Mèla, found a second life abroad. In 1986 the Belgian label Crammed Discs released a collection under that title drawn from two of those Kaifa albums. Ethiopia was then in the Western news for famine and repression, and the very different picture this music offered won wide acclaim in the young world music scene. It made Mahmoud a household name far beyond Ethiopia. When Buda Musique began its Éthiopiques CD series in the late 1990s, Erè Mèla Mèla was reissued as volume seven, and in 2007 Mahmoud won a BBC World Music Award. A handyman's lucky night became, for many Western listeners, their first encounter with Ethiopian music.