Italy’s ‘Terre di Mezzo’ groove Addis

By Kirubel Tadesse

Italian jazz group, Terre di Mezzo, presented a much acclaimed concert at the Italian Cultural Institute on December 3, 2007. In this the group’s first performance in Addis, the auditorium of the Institute was filled to capacity with Ethiopian and expatriate jazz aficionados. The audience enjoyed the concert immensely with late arrivals sitting on the floor.
Terre di Mezzo played more than five songs from its reportoire.The group so far has released two album; the first after the group’s name and the second named ‘Faro.’Emiliano Rodriguez (sax), Simone Zanchini (accordion), Roberto Bartoli (double bass) and Ettore Fioravanti (drums) make up the group Terre di Mezzo. Members all came from different musical experiences like classic, jazz, ethno music and others. “The combination of many styles characterizes the sound of the group and this is a kind of music that embraces different atmospheres from the Mediterranean area, with out leaving out jazz roots,” explains the group’s flier distributed during the concert. It added that starting from 1995, the group has played in several festivals and musical reviews in countries such as Belgium, Netherlands, Slovenia, Croatia, Austria, England, Lebanon and Tunisia.

Thousand Stars Rift Valley Music Festival

By Muluken Yewondwossen

The Millennium Thousand Stars Rift Valley Music Festival will be held in Arba Minch, SNNPS from 15 -17 December with three days of music and dance.
The festival is rapidly becoming established as an extraordinary cultural event and a unique edition to Africa’s expanding cultural calendar.
With many performers coming from very remote areas and communities, the festival is a rare opportunity to share in and celebrate the musical and cultural diversity of the region.
The BBC’s Channel 3 will be featuring this program as well as the National Geography’s channel which is sending a group. FROOTS, a British music journal, is to devote its front page for this year’s thousand stars music festival.
The festival provides local artists, musicians and dancers with opportunities to benefit from the chance to present their musical traditions and cultural heritage to a global audience and additional income in the form of artists’ fees as well as in terms of exposure to the potential of tourist derived revenues. The festival seeks to encourage participation of local people on their own terms.
This year’s millennium festival celebrates Ethiopia’s remarkable cultural heritage as a gift for the rest of the world. It is a great chance for policy makers to become familiar with local traditions and indigenous knowledge and for elders to pass on their heritage to the young generations.
Gughe Indigenous Art and Music Association (GIAMA), a civil society association established for artistic and cultural promotion and preservation, promotes awareness, appreciation and mutual understanding of diverse culture and life-ways of the ethno-linguistic groups living in the Rift valley rThousand Stars Rift Valley Music Festival
egion.
In the long term GIAMA seeks to establish the Thousand Stars Rift Valley Music Festival as a corner stone for international involvement and co-operation with the people of Ethiopia’s southern Rift Valley.

Kistet: Touchingly intelligent

Directed by: Alemtsehay Bekele
Written by: Eineyew Dechassa
Producer: Yared Teklemedhin
Type: Romantic Suspense
Duration: 105 minutes

After nineteen years, “Jossy” is back in Ethiopia from New York to marry a beautiful girl that his sister introduced him through the mail. Before he gets enough of cursing Addis with his wife to be, curiosity leads him to a point of no return. His first love, who he wants just to say ‘I understand and forgive what you did’, has unveiled the truth which could have changed his life in the last two decades. It was easy for this unfortunate couple to put two and two together and realize that it was Yoseph’s sister that was writing letters on their behalf once they sit down and talk. As per the letters both purportedly received repeatedly from each other, they moved on or, at least they thought so.
The main character of ‘Kistet’ is Yoseph, played wonderfully by Solomon Bogale. He was ready to go back to his first love, even if it means devastating the girl he promised to marry. ‘Haimanot’, Yoseph’s love interest, played excellently by Roman Befekadu, couldn’t just let go a loving husband and two amazing kids. Before they get a chance to calmly discuss what future they can have, a life threatening situation complicates things for this couple.
‘Kistet’, not only offers a touching story with a smart ending, but also some new faces and wonderful acting from both young actors and the veterans matured ones like Fekadu Teklemariam.
In this touching story, its important part which is the hatred Yoseph’s sister feels towards ‘Haimanot’ is unexplained and seems something put on the viewer’s shoulder with out any justification. The director should not just say somebody hates someone starting from childhood, especially when it is the focal point where all conflicts arise from. Some unedited dialogues and unnecessary scenes are some of Kistet’s shortcomings, but they are all tolerable since the film tells this real story which you can easily picture your self being in the same position.
‘Kistet’ is currently screened in several theatres in Addis including at Cinema Empire where hundreds form long queues four times every Sunday. Kistet is a film which can be enjoyed by anybody who thinks the glass is half full.

Africa 2000

Republic of Senegal

Senegal is Africa’s westernmost nation. It borders the Atlantic for nearly 700 kilometers, its coastline breaking only slightly to allow the sliver of Gambia – which extends far into the heart of Senegal.
Senegal is named after the Senegal River. The area become known to the old world after it was ‘discovered” by Portuguese mariners in the 15th century. After remaining virtually undisturbed for about 200 years, the African kingdoms and tribal chiefdoms were gradually subjugated by the French as of the early decades of the 17th century. The last independent Muslim state fell after courageously holding out until 1893.
The people of Senegal, as diverse as those of its neighbors, became gradually united in the liberation struggle. Senegal was fortunate enough to have produced a far sighted and highly intelligent scholar leader in.Leopold Sedar Senghor. This man was to go on to be Senegal’s first sovereign leader in 1960 (see Poet-President below)
Prior to independence, the geo-political reality was a complex one as the British were in control of the Gambia River and its water shed area which is effectively encircled by Senegal. The colonizing powers decided to combine their colonies into one state. However, the Senegalese preferred their very own nation and the plan fell through. In 1982 the two nations joined a loose confederation which lasted up to 1989 and called Senegabia.
In 2000 Abdoulaye Wade became the first President of Senegal to be elected from outside the Socialist Party of Senegal which had been in power for about four decades.

Facts and Figures

Location- Extreme end of West Africa, Mauritania on north, Mali on East, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau on south. The nation of Gambia is almost completely encircled by Senegal
Area-196,190 sq km
Topography-Low plains rise from Atlantic coast, Southwest has swamps and jungle
Population-12,191,000
Distribution – 50% urban
Ethnic Make-up-Wolof, Pular, Serer, Jola, Mandinke, Soninke
Languages – French (official), Wolf, Pulaar, Jola, Mandinka
Religions –Muslim and Christian
Capital City – Dakar, pop-2,159,000
Other City – Kawlac, Port Louis
Government Type –Republic
Head of State– President Abdoulaye Wade, since 2000
Head of Government - P.M Macky Sall, since 2006
Currency – CFA France (XOF) 512.27 = $ 1 US
Gross Domestic Product - $ 20.5 bln
Per Capita GDP -$ 1,200
Economy –Food and fish processing, mining, fertilizer, peanuts, millet, rice, cotton, phosphates, iron ore
Electricity Production – 1.5 bln kwh
Literacy – 40%
Life Expectancy – 55 male, 57.7 female
AIDS Rate – 0.9 %
Airports –9
Railroads – 906 kms
Vehicles –280,000 units
Telephones – 266,600 lines
Radios – 141 per 1000 people
TV sets – 41 per 1000 people
Daily Newspaper Circulation – 5.3 per 1000.
Internet –482,000 users

Facts and figures are the latest available at time of publication and may not necessarily be the most accurate.

King of mbalax

Today's popular music in Senegal, known in the Wolof language as mbalax, developed as a blend of the country's traditional griot percussion and praise-singing with the Afro-Cuban arrangements and flavors which made "the return trip" from the Caribbean to West Africa in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s and have flourished in West Africa ever since. Beginning in the mid-1970s the resulting mix was modernized with a gloss of more complex indigenous Senegalese dance rhythms, roomy and melodic guitar and saxophone solos, chattering talking-drum soliloquies and, on occasion, Sufi-inspired Muslim religious chant. This created a new music which was at turns nostalgic, restrained and stately, or celebratory, explosively syncopated and indescribably funky. Younger Senegalese musicians steeped in Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, James Brown, and the whole range of American jazz, soul music and rock, which Senegal's cosmopolitan capital, Dakar, had enthusiastically absorbed, were rediscovering their heritage and seeking out traditional performers, particularly singers and talking-drummers, to join their bands. (The griots - musicians, praise-singers and storyteller-historians - comprise a distinct hereditary caste in Wolof society and throughout West Africa.) As it emerged from this period of fruitful musical turbulence, mbalax would eventually find in Youssou N'Dour the performer who has arguably had more to do with its shaping than any other individual.
Born in Dakar in 1959, N'Dour is a singer endowed with remarkable range and poise, and, as a composer, bandleader and producer, with a prodigious musical intelligence. The New York Times most recently described his voice as an "arresting tenor, a supple weapon deployed with prophetic authority". N'Dour absorbs the entire Senegalese musical spectrum in his work, often filtering this through the lens of genre-defying rock or pop music from outside Senegalese culture.
Named "African Artist of the Century" by the English publication Folk Roots at the threshold of the year 2000, N'Dour has made mbalax famous throughout the world during more than twenty years of recording and touring outside of Senegal with his band, The Super Etoile. The Village Voice's Robert Christgau, dean of American rock critics, has boldly called N'Dour "the world's greatest pop vocalist" and finds him "the one African moving inexorably toward the world-pop fusion everyone else theorizes about". Peter Gabriel, whose duet with N'Dour on In Your Eyes (from Gabriel's 1985 album SO) defined a truly distinguished moment in the history of rock, has proclaimed N'Dour, as a singer, simply "one of the best alive".
N'Dour solidified his leadership of The Super Etoile by 1979, having retained the essential personnel from earlier incarnations of the group, and he soon thereafter launched an international career with the help of a Senegalese taxi drivers' fraternal association in France and a small circle of supporters in England. The beginnings in Dakar had been more inauspicious. As a willowy teenager, N'Dour had to resort to hustling pirate gigs in the parking lots outside certain of the city's dance clubs to which he and his bandmates had uneasy or no access, his distinctive voice eventually earning him a reputation as a boy wonder and the occasional live amateur-hour slot on the National Radio. As early as age twelve, N'Dour had also been performing at neighborhood religious-ceremonial occasions in the hard-bitten Medina section of the city where he grew up as the first-born child of a pious auto mechanic, Elimane N'Dour, and his wife, N'Deye Sokhna Mboup, herself of griot origin and an occasional performer in the ceremonies of the Medina neighborhoods.