ETHIOPIAN DANCE BAND CALLS JP HOME
By Sandra Storey
Jamaica Plain Gazette
N ov 6 2009
Performs Nov. 8 at Midway Cafe
Jamaica Plain’s local Ethiopian dance group Debo Band will perform
on Nov. 8 at the Midway Cafe.
Sunday’s show will be the first time 11-member Debo Band plays in
its home base since the group took a month-long tour of Ethiopia and
Tanzania this summer.
"We’ve been itching to play in our own neighborhood again," said
Debo’s founder, Danny Mekonnen, who is an Ethiopian-American and Ph.D.
candidate in ethnomusicology at Harvard. The JP resident, who plays
saxophones, communicated with the Gazette mostly by e-mail last week.
Other JP resident band members are Stacey Cordeiro (accordion);
Jonah Rapino (electric violin); Brendon Wood (guitar); Arik Grier
(sousaphone); and PJ Goodwin (bass, sound engineer). Kaethe Hostetter
(violina, aka 5-string violin) lives in Roxbury.The group rehearses
on Green St.
Mekonnen said the group got its "big break" in JP at the Milky Way,
playing three successful concerts in 2008. "In two of these occasions
the line for entry extended all the way around the corner towards
the Hi Lo market," Mekonnen said.
He said in an e-mail that Debo re-creates the urban dance club scene
of 1960s Addis Ababa. "In the 1920s, Emperor Haile Selassie fell in
love with a brass band from Armenia and invited them home to become
the national band of Ethiopia," Mekonnen wrote.
In the decades that followed, the relationship developed into a
"sound unlike any other, combining brass band instrumentation with
the groove of American jazz and funk, all while preserving the
traditional rhythms, modes, and indigenous dance of the fiercely
independent Ethiopian people," he added.
Internationally known band Ansambl Mastika will be on the same bill.
Led by clarinetist Greg Squared, Matiska plays original tunes in
the style of village folk dance music of Eastern Europe, the Balkan
Peninsula and Caucus Mountains. Squared has traveled and studied with
some well-known Balkan folk musicians.
"We’re so excited that Mastika is coming to our local bar," Mekonnen
said.
Debo Band with Ansambl Mastika will perform Nov. 8 at 10 p.m. with
doors open at 9 p.m. at the Midway Cafe at 3496 Washington
St. Admission is $10.