Beautifully presented double CD with a fully illustrated booklet!
Here is a remarkable archive -- the first commercial recording of Ethiopian music, indeed one of the earliest surviving examples of recorded African music. Though the tracks have been carefully restored from 78s reissued in the mid 1920s they originated in around 1908 in a recording studio in Berlin where Tessema Eshete had been sent by the Emperor Menelik to study car mechanics. Tessema never sang on record again though as a poet, sculptor and visionary innovator he became a major figure in Ethiopian artistic life despite, in later years, making an enemy of Haile Selassie.
In comparison to the popular Ethiopian music of a much later period these recordings of course will sound quite primitive but anyone who has been captivated by the Ethiopiques series will find this release an indispensable prologue.