Orchestra Ethiopia was a flexible group of around a dozen musicians, who between 1963 and 1975 led a revival of interest in the country’s traditional folk music - oddly at the same time as the US jazz-blues-soul-fuelled ‘golden age’ of Ethiopian pop music was at it’s peak. The Orchestra was founded by Egyptian musician-composer-musicologist, Halim El-Dabh - who was soon joined by converts John Coe and Charles Sutton of the American Peace Corps. In 1966, they found their definitive Ethiopian mentor in Tesfaye Lemma.