A Bridge From the Netherlands to Ethiopia: The Ex, Han Bennink & Getatchew Mekuria

23Sep09

Touring is complicated.  There’s booking, merchandise, promotion, transportation… will anyone show up for the show?  Where will you sleep afterwards?  Will gas be affordable?  What if the van breaks down?

So… how about touring Ethiopia?

The idea is something I’d dismiss as a pipe dream, but Dutch anarcho-punk rockers The Ex have toured Ethiopia twice since 2004.  Take a minute to think about the logistics of an endeavor like that.  How do you promote your shows in a place where the language, musical taste, performance practice, and lines of communication are so different?  What is an appropriate venue?  Will local officials be amenable?

They made it work.  They toured with their own PA and a portable generator.  They split their set between their own songs and some Ethiopian tunes that they learned.  They put up fliers around town.  They gave away thousands of cassettes.  They didn’t charge admission.

“We weren’t really playing in clubs at all. We were playing in public spaces more like. On the stairs of a theater we played. And, basically, on a giant podium in a big outdoor square, which is right next to a sort of service station, but where about three or four thousand people came. And then we played in a giant old cow barn, and then in a police community hall. [laughs] It was very odd, mostly not really set up at all for gigs. And actually we had a little sort of generator to power the amps and the PA–we brought our own PA and everything. It was really set up on the day when we arrived into town. We would have to go and meet the chief of police of the town and make a deal with them. We’d say, ‘We’d like to play here. Can you suggest a place?’ And they would suggest a place. That’s how we ended up in the police community hall once, because that was what the chief of police of that town offered. And sometimes they would ask for $50 for us playing, and other times they didn’t ask anything. And then we would drive around advertising the gig just with a megaphone and sticking posters up on the day of the show.”
-Andy Moor, from an interview with Ethiopian News

They had one other good idea: they brought legendary Dutch percussionist Han Bennink with them.

[note - that was Bennink demolishing the kit in the first video.  The Ex's drummer, Kat, was singing on that one.]

For The Ex, this was not only an opportunity to share their music with people who would never have heard it otherwise.  It was also about finding a deeper connection with Ethiopian music that they themselves had been inspired by.

“We were actually into the music long before the Ethiopiques series. I’ve been listening to African music for 20 years, but maybe about 15 years or 17 years ago I heard this record called Ere Mela Mela by Mahmoud Ahmed… [highly recommended record!  -timm]
We used to go to restaurants in Amsterdam because there’s about 10 here, Ethiopian restaurants. And we used to hear all these old, wobbly cassettes that they were playing, and there were all this stuff we didn’t know, so we were always asking the owner of the restaurant what it was. And they would say some unpronounceable name that we never remembered. It actually took a long time before the names actually stuck in our head and we got a bit of an idea of what it was all about. And then we discovered Getachew when we went to Ethiopia and we found a cassette of his music. It was a copy of a copy of a copy, but it really stood out.“

Moor is talking about “The King of Ethiopian Sax”, Getatchew Mekuria.  While on tour, they were put in touch with Mekuria and before long they started playing music together.  The end result was that Mekuria, now in his 70s, asked The Ex to be his band.  They recorded a record (Moa Anbessa) and toured the US and elsewhere.  Here’s a video from a performance they did in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.  Getatchew’s sax sounds phenomenal, fresh, and the dual guitar lead at 2:45 just kills:

What do you think – did they succeed in overcoming the cultural divide?

Filed under: audio, rock, youtube   |  1 Comment
Tags: dutch, ethiophia, ethiopiques, getatchew mekuria, han bennink, mahmoud ahmed, netherlands, punk, the ex, tour