Mulatu Astatke

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Mulatu Astatke is one of Ethiopia’s most celebrated musicians and arrangers, best known for changing the face of Ethiopian music during the “Swinging Addis” era of the late ‘60s and 1970s. He is the father of the music he has named “Ethio Jazz”.

At 81, the Ethiopian composer and multi-instrumentalist is considered the father of "Ethio-jazz," a movement born in the late 1960s that fused jazz, Latin music, and traditional Ethiopian music. After the "golden age of the 1970s" in Ethiopia, his music regained popularity in 1998 thanks to the Ethiopiques record series, before being further popularized by Jim Jarmusch's 2005 film Broken Flowers. Since then, he has toured worldwide and collaborated with numerous artists from all walks of life, bringing his hypnotic and haunting music, both modern and traditional, to a wider audience.

For 2025, the Father of Ethio Jazz will bring he farewell shows to London and annnounces a new studio album, Mulatu Plays Mulatu, for Strut. His first major studio album in over 10 years, Mulatu Plays Mulatu features his full big band performing alongside Ethiopian cultural musicians and stands as a fitting climax to an incredible career. “Throughout my life, I wanted to bring Ethio jazz to all corners of the world for people to enjoy and I feel that I have succeeded in that,” says Mulatu. The world of music would definitely echo those sentiments.

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