http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTRmpJ_EpJE

Dub Colossus member Samuel Yirga “plays one night a week in Addis’s only jazz club/coffee bar, where the way he mixes Keith Jarrett and Herbie Hancock with Ethiojazz has won him a cult following.” He says:

I take traditional music and turn it around, and people in Ethiopia are starting to listen to the way it swings now. Our musical culture is under attack from inside and out, it’s all rock bands, hip-hop groups and pop singers, and nobody can afford to run a big band.

Via Real World Records.

Further Reading

And do not hinder them

We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.

The new antisemitism?

Stripped of its veneer of nuance, Noah Feldman’s essay in ‘Time’ is another attempt to silence opponents of the Israeli state by smearing them as anti-Jewish racists.