Weekly Music Roundup: Hachalu Hundessa RIP, Monte, and Jorja Smith

Week of July 6: This week, bird song in Colombia from Monte (aka Simón Mejía, founder and leader of Bomba Estéreo), the murder of Ethiopian singer Hachalu Hundessa, BRIT Award-winning singer Jorja Smith,and Kanye’s busy week.

Singer’s Murder Brings Protest and Rioting To Ethiopia

A member of a historically oppressed minority group is killed; protesters fill the streets, demanding equality and justice; statues are toppled… the story will be familiar to Americans in the summer of 2020, but it also happening now in Ethiopia. Last week, the popular singer Hachalu Hundessa (also spelled Haacaaluu Hundeessaa) was murdered; because he was a hugely influential figure among Ethiopia’s Oromo people, this was seen as an attack against a group that comprises more than a third of the population but has traditionally been repressed by successive governments. (The current prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, is Oromo, and has been pleading for calm.) A bad situation quickly turned worse as both police and an armed faction of Oromo protesters clashed; over 200 people died. This is not the place to go into the intricacies of Ethiopia’s many ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups, and for Americans who have never heard Ethiopian pop, this may all seem quite distant. But Ethiopian music had a so-called Golden Age in the late 60s and early 70s, when James Brown-style funk was introduced to bands that were already blending East African scales and rhythms with Western European brass band music.  While the dominant Amhara group was well represented, the scene was ethnically diverse: Mahmoud Ahmed (my personal fave) was Gurage, and the great Tlahoun Gessesse was Oromo. That scene came to a crashing halt with the end of the Hailie Selassie empire in 1974, but recent singers like Hachalu Hundessa still use a lot of the sounds that made Addis Ababa into “Swingin’ Addis” so long ago. In Hundessa’s case, he also specifically called out the displacement and harassment of Oromo people in his music, and celebrated their culture. This song, “Maalan Jira,” is notable for its prominent use of traditional Oromo elements like the flute and the song’s infectious dance rhythm.    

Kanye West Fans Are Asking – Again – Will He Or Won’t He?

He released an incendiary new song and video, and then announced he was running for president. Just another week in the life of Kanye West. First came his new collaboration with Travis Scott, called “Wash Us In The Blood.” The song unexpectedly fuses the spiritual themes of his last album, Jesus Is King, with the heavy, industrial sound of his dark 2013 album Yeezus. Both West and Scott offer an unflinching look at the limited opportunities, and the looming specter of prison, that have plagued the Black community; but Kanye being Kanye, there’s also a verse that’s pretty much about, you know, Kanye. Both rappers invoke the Holy Spirit and ask for divine help – perhaps implying that none seems to be forthcoming from Washington. And that leads to West’s other big news, his Saturday announcement that he’s running for president. Yes, in 2020. To be clear, he hasn’t filed any paperwork, isn’t on any ballots, and has already missed the deadline for most states’ ballots; but hey, his name is in the news again, so job done. 

Meanwhile, West announced other plans for the Fall, namely, releasing his next album, called God’s Country. Given the strange and twisted sagas that have accompanied several of West’s most recent releases, his fans may well be wondering what – if anything – to expect from their man when autumn rolls around.

Ambient Electronica And Birdsong Meet in Colombia’s Monte

Monte is a new name, but the guy behind it is no newcomer: Simón Mejía is the leader of the popular Colombian dance band Bomba Estéreo. Monte is the name he’s using for this side project, which uses field recordings he made in the Colombian Amazon and along the country’s main river, the Magdalena, as source material for electronic music. Mejia has done something like this before, with great success: Bomba Estéreo’s “To My Love,” their biggest hit, was inspired by a bird song from Colombia’s Caribbean coast. But the new album, called Mirla, will be a more ambient, instrumental affair; although if the first single, also called “Mirla,” is any indication, it’ll still be a danceable one. The song begins with the sounds of a bird call and the traditional string instrument known as charango, but the bird sounds almost imperceptibly give way to electronic textures and a thumping drum track. Reminiscent perhaps of the indigenous-meets-contemporary work of the Argentine producer Chancha Via Circuito, Monte will release the full album on August 21. 

This Is The Kit Releases New Song And Announces New LP

This Is The Kit is the project led by British singer and songwriter Kate Stables, who deftly fuses the sounds of indie rock and contemporary classical music with songs that seem like an extension of the long tradition of British folk. She’s announced a forthcoming album called Off Off On and released the first single, called “This Is What You Did.” The song is built around a repeating banjo riff, but quickly accrues layers of keyboards and electric guitar, while Stables offers a repeating loop of expressions of self-doubt – a neat analogy to those moments when you get stuck in a vicious cycle of dark thoughts and need more than anything to get out of your own head. Josh Kaufman of Bonny Light Horseman produced the record with Kate Stables and this first look at Off Off On suggests a collaboration that is, as the saying goes, more than the sum of its parts. 

An Unexpected Cover From British Star Jorja Smith

English singer Jorja Smith is only 23, but she’s already a BRIT Award winner and has worked with some of the biggest names in music on both sides of the Atlantic (Kendrick Lamar here in the States, Stormzy in the UK). Her own songs make good use of her versatile voice, which can draw on jazz, R&B, rap and pop in equal measure. So her appearance on a cover of the song “Rose Rouge,” originally by the French acid-jazz/house-music producer St. Germain, might qualify as a bit of luxury casting. After all, the song doesn’t ask much of its singer; in St. Germain’s original, he simply chanted the lyric “I want you to get together, put your hands together one time” over a deep carpet of jazzy horns and pulsing dance rhythms.  new version clears out some of the accompanying layers, giving Smith’s vocals more space. It also features a video that she describes as “a tribute to all the people who have paved the way for black empowerment and freedom.”

“Rose Rouge” comes from the forthcoming compilation Blue Note Re:Imagined, a selection of older tracks from the veteran jazz label’s archives done up in new arrangements by some of the leading figures on London’s diverse, sort-of-jazzy music scene, including Shabaka Hutchings, Ezra Collective and many more. It comes out on September 25.

Lianne La Havas Releases a Socially-Distanced Video

Lianne La Havas is another fine London singer, although somewhat more established on the scene (Prince was a fan). Like Jorja Smith, she’s half Jamaican; has a memorable, wide-ranging voice; and has done an unexpected cover: in her case, Radiohead’s “Weird Fishes,” which by the end might be even more angst-ridden than Radiohead’s original. But the track “Can’t Fight” is a totally different, um, animal. Both songs are from her forthcoming third album, which will be self-titled, and which comes out on July 17. “Can’t Fight” is a genial, poppy exercise in R&B and musical optimism, and she’s released a video for it shot in and around her home in South London. Social distancing required some changes to the usual video-making process, leading to the comic sight of La Havas’s head poorly photoshopped onto a drummer’s body. (The guitar playing is, as usual, her own.) But the mood of both the song and the video is a sunny, summery one. That’s not to say that La Havas is not aware of what’s going on in the world: she is doing a live, multi-camera solo show at London’s Roundhouse which will be streamed live to a ticketed audience online on Wednesday, July 15 (9pm EST), and she’ll be donating her proceeds from the concert to Black Lives Matter organizations.