AEM016 Debo Band / Kiddid

I might as well get it out of the way at the begin­ning: Debo Band is not world music. Debo Band is some­thing far more inter­est­ing and com­plex than the safe, de-contextualized com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of music from the per­ceived golden age of another coun­try sold in cof­feeshop chains to cool dads wear­ing Keds and visors. Debo Band, orga­nized by sax­o­phon­ist and leader Danny Mekon­nen back in 2006, is a band whose music, though it may ini­tially sound for­eign to ears weaned on indie rock, can trace its roots through almost every arena of Amer­i­can music. Since its incep­tion, the band has been deeply involved in the DIY scene in Boston, play­ing loft par­ties and rock venues for the young and artis­ti­cally inclined, while at the same time secur­ing tour­ing grants from respectable insti­tutes like the Mid Atlantic Arts Foun­da­tion. They have per­formed with and befriended bril­liant Dutch anarcho-punx The Ex, who them­selves have devel­oped quite an inter­est in Ethiopian music, col­lab­o­rat­ing with leg­endary woolly-toned sax­o­phon­ist Getatchew Mekurya on their last album.

What is remark­able and just plain sweet about Debo Band is that they man­age to strad­dle a lot of seem­ingly con­tra­dic­tory posi­tions. On the one hand, their music is deeply tra­di­tional, includ­ing a lot of cov­ers of Ethiopian folk and pop songs from decades ago, yet on the other it is staunchly con­tem­po­rary, incor­po­rat­ing orig­i­nal com­po­si­tions and traces of the indi­vid­ual mem­bers other projects, which range from the dra­matic post-rock silent-film sound­tracks of the Devil Music Ensem­ble to the dance­hall derived exper­i­men­tal elec­tron­ica of some­time per­cus­sion­ist Daniel D’Errico’s Kid­did project. Even at it’s very incep­tion Debo Band was both a trib­ute to the Swing­ing Addis era of Ethiopian music and an out­let for Mekon­nen (who is also on his way to an eth­no­mu­si­col­ogy PhD at Har­vard) to exper­i­ment with new forms and meth­ods in com­po­si­tion. They play party music and art music at the same time, some­thing uncom­mon and won­der­ful that they share with some of the best musi­cians in pop his­tory as well as a lot of elec­tronic con­tem­po­raries. This con­ver­gence of art and party is some­thing exem­pli­fied by artists like Dan Dea­con with his composition-induced dance fren­zies as well as the whole boom­ing dub­step scene, and as such it makes per­fect sense that Debo Band should col­lab­o­rate with Kid­did on this dig­i­tal sin­gle. They both know how to make you get up and move.

Orga­ni­za­tion­ally, Debo Band actu­ally bears a resem­blance to one of those enor­mous pop music col­lec­tives peo­ple always refer to as “ram­shackle,” the word ram­shackle basi­cally being code for the fact that the band drops and adds mem­bers so fast no one can actu­ally keep track of who is in the fold at any given moment. Debo Band live usu­ally con­sists of between nine and twelve mem­bers, play­ing the sort of Ethio-soul that Amer­i­can audi­ences, myself included, have recently been hipped to by the fan­tas­tic Ethiopiques series (or the sound­track to Jim Jarmusch’s “Bro­ken Flow­ers” [it’s okay, you can admit it]). The largely acoustic instru­men­ta­tion (drums, tuba, accor­dion, horns, strings and vocals) is a nod that goes a touch fur­ther back than the early 70s sound of Mulatu Astatke’s elec­tric Ethio-jazz , all the way to the brass band style that cap­ti­vated the coun­try back in the first half of the 20th cen­tury, dur­ing the reign of Haile Selassie.

The A-side here is a stir­ring live per­for­mance of “Aderech Arada”, an Ethiopian song about a woman break­ing out of her law­ful mar­riage, trav­el­ing to Arada (a cen­tral area of Addis Ababa that also hap­pens to be a red-light dis­trict) and falling into sin. You know, the usual. The time feel is a kind of lop­ing 12/8 (actu­ally 15/8 for much of this par­tic­u­lar tune, if you want to get tech­ni­cal) that is very com­mon in Debo Band’s music, as well as in most Ethiopian pop and tra­di­tional music. It pulls back hard whilst keep­ing the bass drum and hi-hat click­ing on the down­beats. The result is a kind of tautly stretched and rolling time feel that locks in per­fectly with the won­der­fully twitchy and propul­sive Ethiopian eskista shoul­der dance com­monly per­formed along­side the music.

The track is smartly arranged by Mekon­nen, who keeps each ele­ment from intrud­ing on the oth­ers, yet min­gles them into a sat­is­fy­ing whole. The accor­dion, the only chordal instru­ment here, takes on more of a melodic role, leav­ing a lot of open space for the drums and lilt­ing tuba (that phrase sounds ridicu­lous but lis­ten to the track and tell me that is not lilt­ing) to carry the tense, bounc­ing rhythm while the horns blare out the melodies in quick, bold strokes. The call and response that hap­pens between horns and vocals in the verses dur­ing the sec­ond half of the song is a per­fect arrang­ing touch, both propul­sive and unob­tru­sive. The vocals them­selves (headed by lead singer Bruck Tes­faye, whose verse state­ments are answered by a cho­rus of keen­ing female voices) are loaded with orna­ments and a rapid vibrato which, along­side the com­plex­ity of the alter­nat­ing glot­tal and gem­i­nated con­so­nants, has the effect of mak­ing me sound kind of dumb when I sing along. The track is pulled from an upcom­ing com­pi­la­tion enti­tled 8th Ethiopian Music(s) Fes­ti­val 2009, fea­tur­ing as artis­tic direc­tor the pres­ti­gious over­seer of the Ethiopiques series, Fran­cis Fal­ceto. The record­ing, done by Jeroen Visser of the Swiss F.ishing B.akery L.abs, is amaz­ingly clean and clear for a live performance.

The B-side is Kiddid’s remix of the very same track, a per­fect illus­tra­tion of the past/future, roots/wings kind of con­flu­ence Debo Band epit­o­mizes. The open­ing horn salvo is left intact, lead­ing not into the rolling, organic feel of the live ver­sion but rather into a four four back­beat with a fuzzy, unchang­ing bass pulse that sits per­fectly between a shuf­fle and straight time. Part of me is con­vinced that the key to good dance music is that it hov­ers in this mid­dle ground between time feels, much in the way that early rock and roll (Chuck Berry, for exam­ple) com­bined straight eighth gui­tar solos with swung drums. After a sparse vocal break­down that turns the cho­rus of the song into some­thing almost sin­is­ter and creepy, set­ting it over only metro­nomic ticks, the beat kicks back in, mir­ror­ing the Debo Band ver­sion by back­ing the horns with only the drums and afore­men­tioned bass pulse. In this way, Kid­did shares the sparse­ness that is cen­tral to Debo Band’s entire sound, though here it is trans­formed into some­thing you’d expect to hear at a hip dance night with a one-word name. Through­out almost the entire track there is also a barely per­cep­ti­ble, scratchy, old-vinyl sound, per­haps a jokey ref­er­ence to the impossible-to-determine age of the orig­i­nal recording.

What with the frac­tur­ing of cul­ture brought on by the end­less choices of the inter­net, music is becom­ing increas­ingly seg­re­gated and niche-oriented, but the real gold is the stuff that opens its arms to all influ­ences and all audi­ences. Debo Band, in their work with Kid­did and in their col­lab­o­ra­tions with tra­di­tional Ethiopian musi­cians, in their per­for­mances at Ethiopian fes­ti­vals and Boston loft par­ties, per­fectly syn­the­sizes their influ­ences into some­thing with the kind of musi­cian­ship that will please the tra­di­tion­al­ists and the kind of forward-looking open­ness that will sat­isfy the young bucks. Go see them live and prac­tice your eskista.

Note: peo­ple who want to learn about Ethiopian music from some­one who actu­ally knows what they’re talk­ing about should check out this inter­view with Fal­ceto.

Gabe Birn­baum

Side A — Aderech Arada Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B — Aderech Arada (Kid­did Remix) Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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