by Staff | 03.02.2009 Source: Filter-Mag.com

Part 1
We may have indie film master Jim Jarmusch to thank for placing Mulatu Astatke in many music libraries, courtesy of the soundtrack to Jarmusch’s 2005 Bill Murray vehicle, Broken Flowers. But Astatke, the father of Ethio Jazz, made history long before the film was released. Astatke, born in Jimma, Ethiopia, is known for combining jazz and Latin music influences with traditional Ethiopian music to create a whole new genre of his own. FILTER caught up with the music guru to talk about Ethiopia then and now, music and science, the science of music, accomplishments, dreams, and how it all started.

What was it like for you growing up in Ethiopia? And then, what made you realize you needed to get away to learn more music from the western world?
I was about 16. High school was where everything sucked—the music situation there. As you know, those subjects are not included in high schools, elementary schools, and kindergartens. So I had the choice between that and high school in the northwest. At that time, families didn’t accept you becoming a musician…so my other interest was to become an engineer. I went to high school in England and there, music, art and dance were included. Finally, while I was studying the arts, my teachers found out I had a talent in music.

They found out before you did?
Of course, because of how I was doing in the class—the way I was playing and writing music, they thought I should be a musician.

When did you develop a personal interest in music?
I heard music all the time, all the kids at school listen to all kinds of music. Finally my interests also turned to music, so while I still studied science subjects for two to three years, I was playing in school bands at the same time. I was studying, and at the same time, I was trying to persuade my family that I should be a musician because that’s what I was told. Finally they said, “Okay, if you want it that much you should go study it,” so I went to London. I went to a community college and studied classical music for a while. I was playing with great musicians in London.

Part 2

Unlike Don Johnston (Bill Murray) in Broken Flowers—AKA the film that popularized Ethio Jazz—the father of the genre, Mulatu Astatke, will never stop working or become a shell of his former life.  Here he talks to FILTER about his experiences abroad, the science of music, and his persistence to spread his creation.

(continued from part 1)

How did they receive you in London?
You know, the British were really strict but they were very nice. They gave me the ability to build self-confidence and things like that. British high schools are really very serious and good.

When did you become interested in jazz?
I wanted to try to do compositions and play and write and promote Ethiopian music. I had a few musician friends and I said, “Look, I have a background in classical, but I want to study jazz—do you know any places in America where I can go to learn more about that?” Finally, I came up with Berklee College in Boston, which was the only jazz school in the world at that time, it was 1958. So I went to Berklee and that’s where I really worked my tools. Then I started thinking while writing: “Why don’t I come up with something called Ethio Jazz; why don’t I blend Ethiopian music and jazz?” I thought that if I blend them directly then it would sound like two cultures going at the same time. It took me time but I somehow managed, somehow I put them together. So, my research paper at Harvard, where I recently studied, was about Ethiopian contribution to the world of music and art. It talks about contributions like if you were to go to southern Ethiopia there’s a tribe that plays diminishing scale, which is so great.

Are they aware of what they’re doing and how it’s different?
Well, it’s their country’s music, they grew up with it.

So they have no idea what a diminishing scale means—it just is one?
No, it just is one. 

How do you feel music and science are connected? 
The harmony section of music is a combination of different sounds...like scientists usually mix chemicals with different chemicals to cause whatever reaction. So you have the artist mixing up different colors and coming up with some kind of new color. Music is the same. They are all connected whether they work with chemicals or work with sounds: artists work with colors. So we mix them up—we come up with something else.  So music is what I call science; that’s what makes music science.

Once Ethio Jazz was created, how long and how hard did you have to work to spread it? Are you still playing new variations of that form or are you now focusing on educating other people?
I recorded a CD, which isn’t out yet and has a different concept of the Ethio Jazz. I combined the jazz element with the five-tonal, but that was my experimentation which was seen at Harvard. It’s been very successful. I’ve been working hard to really find out this identity—the different identities of the Ethio Jazz. Also, by upgrading cultural instruments I am able to play in Europe. My target is the cultural Ethio Jazz, which is what we are now working on at MIT. I am using traditional instruments and playing jazz movements and jazz-everything on it. So, not only am I still playing but I am also writing new materials. I never stop. I just keep on working to come up with different sounds, different approaches to music. I hope I have time in the future to do more research. I’ll never stop; I’ll keep on working.

In spreading the word of your creation of Ethio Jazz, it certainly helps to find fans in people like Jim Jarmusch.
He is definitely a great man. He’s one that is really here for me and speaks for my efforts for years and years. We’ve been working for years and finally, now it’s like it’s all over the world. It’s so great this music is really coming up now. We just keep on pushing and playing it out.

Part 3

Mulato Astatke, the man behind Ethio Jazz, a blend of Ethiopian, Latin and Jazz sounds, has obvious roots in Ethiopia. Read on to see what Astatke had to tell FILTER about where he plans to take Ethio Jazz and how he stays true to his Ethiopian roots.

(continued from part 2)

When you started creating music did you ever fell like it would present an opportunity for you to become a lecturer and educator?
No, I just wanted to become a musician. I just wanted to work hard on the future and present something new to the world. But finally I ended up at Harvard and at MIT.

I’m sure you have encountered people who are excited you took Ethiopia music and merged it with jazz, but have you encountered people who weren’t so happy?
Yes, but that was before…now people are with it, people are sensitive to different types of music. They love me for my contribution and I have been on FM stations in Ethiopia for about seven years. So, educated people are playing world music, classical music, jazz, jazz fusions, African music... Now they have a great fondness for Ethio Jazz; it’s really lifting up.

Is there anything you maybe see yourself doing that you have not accomplished yet?
I was talking about upgrading Ethiopian musical instruments and using those instruments to be able to play Ethio Jazz; it’s not only upgrading the instruments but also upgrading the traditional musical players. Not only could they think about five tones but now they could think about 12 tones. Upgrading the instruments but also upgrading the musicians to see in different directions—that will be my next work.

Have you had to sacrifice anything in order to follow your musical dreams? Do you still feel you have deep roots to your home in Ethiopia or maybe London or Boston?
Well, our roots are always there and I always look back to my roots, because if you don’t look after your roots, then you’ll be helpless, you won’t be somebody. My motives are very Ethiopian, but meeting musicians, teaching professors and teachers and things help me so much to see the world more, so it’s what I’ve been doing. I travel a lot and play with different musicians. I’m always open to learning and exchanging new ideas, always. So roots are very important, but there are so many things we can study, so many things next to Ethiopia to research and come up with something new. But my dream is upgrading music and also helping professionals and the musicians look after different music in the world.

Part 4

Mulatu Astatke, the father of Ethio Jazz, is a man of many chapters, from his travels and studies abroad to his research into the depths of indigenous music. Here, the man with so much history behind him talks to FILTER about Ethiopian music in the present and his hopes for the future.

(continued from part 3)

What is the musical climate like now in Ethiopia for high school kids?
Hopefully they are given the chance of music and art and culture. They can watch TV programs. They can listen. There are many improvements. There is one music school there; I hope in the future this will lift the spirit of high schools and elementary schools. So far, so good; anyway.

Do you play with the teachers who are teaching at the Ethiopian music academy?
Teachers there sometimes come and jam with us at clubs in Addis. And sometimes when I’m writing compositions to be performed I pick different musicians from different places and I also get musicians from music schools to come and play with us. But I don’t go to the schools, because they have different approaches.

But while you may not be there in person, they’re still teaching your work?
Definitely, because for the seven years I was teaching there, I was teaching not only music for certain amounts of students at school, but since the programs from the school were going to millions and millions of people every day, I was teaching through radio.

Tell me about how the political climate of the country changed and how that influenced what you did. You’ve seen some drastic changes over your lifetime in Ethiopia; has that changed the way the government funds music education?
You know, my stance to this is always: How you build a country is the question. So, I always believe a country is built by different professionals. With scientists, with politicians and this and that, I always feel like we all have our places. I mean, I never had a problem with the three different preachings of Ethiopia, as long as you don’t involve yourself with what they’re doing and you just keep on working on your professions. I just keep on working on my music. I just keep on educating people to love music and art, to love more art, to love Ethio Jazz and also to know the world. I’m so busy with this. I have to do so much, you know, the minute you have start turning your face to something else, you have a problem over here. I always run away from that. I just want to keep working on what I have to contribute to my country. It’s not my job, it’s their job. My job is to upgrade my music and to work hard and make Ethiopia known to the world and show to the world what we are and what we are contributing.

Part 5

Mulatu Astatke, the father of Ethio Jazz, is a man of many chapters, from his travels and studies abroad to his research into the depths of indigenous music. Here, the man with so much history behind him talks to FILTER about what he does besides spreading the word of Ethiopian music and a massive project involving a new combination of his own design.

(continued from part 4)

What do you do when you’re not focusing on music?
Ah. You know what I do? I really love sports. I used to play soccer a lot before, now because of these few years at Harvard, I stopped for almost 2 or 3 years. I used to play soccer a lot. I follow British Premier League. And sometimes, I love to read books.

But you always come back to music.
I love music so much. I can’t get away from it. I can’t. Maybe for a week or so. But to go away for a lifetime, or to leave 6 months…no way, no way. Because I have all kinds of dreams to work on. I’ve been writing music for a play and for film. You never stop, you know. I have a beautiful dream. Maybe you know the place called Lalibela in Ethiopia? There’s a beautiful church, called the Lalibela Church. It’s made out of one big stone, built up and carved out of one big stone. It’s famous in the world, famous. Now when I go back, I really want to open an opera inside that church. I’ve got to go through about 80 or 85 people to get the permission from the government. So I’m working on that now.

Who is going to perform this opera with you?
I have been contacting a few quartets in Europe and also America. I don’t know, maybe even the American embassy could sponsor these guys. So I’m talking with the Norwegian embassy, going to talk with the American embassy and the British embassy. They might be able to bring me those quartets. But the first thing is to work on the place. I think I’m going to get it, it’s so beautiful. But, this is not going to be a jazz thing, this is very symphonic. It’s music from 360 A.D. against the 21st century—it’s a continuation.

Cambridge, MA... Seminal Ethiopian jazz artist Mulatu Astatke will be an Abramowitz Artist-in-Residence from October 10-24 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He will present a public talk and conversation titled, "Ethiopian Contributions to the Development of World Music Instruments" on Thursday, Oct. 23, at 7 p.m. in Room 10-250 (enter 77 Massachusetts Ave.).

Mulatu (Ethiopians are generally referred to by their first names) is one of Ethiopia's major musicians. Born in 1943, in the city of Jimma, Mulatu originally wanted to be an engineer.

"The problem with most [developing countries] is that music wasn’t taken very seriously," he said in a May 2008 interview in Evil Monito Magazine. "Science, like biology or chemistry, was given more importance in the education system. Actually, I had an early desire to become an aeronautical engineer, so I had the opportunity to go to an international school in North Wales that gave its students the freedom to try all different types of subjects, including music and the arts. I was one of the lucky few from my country to go to Europe and study. I didn’t necessarily grow up with music; actually, I was really involved in mathematics and physics. Because of that my approach to music is different from others’. As a scientist, you would mix chemicals; in the same manner I would mix sounds."

From there, Mulatu went to a science school in Birmingham, but soon transferred to Trinity College of Music in London, where he studied clarinet, harmony and theory. In the late 1950s, Mulatu was the first African student at Boston's Berklee College of Music.

A multi-instrumentalist, mastering vibraphone, keyboards, organ, and percussion, Mulatu is credited with adding instruments associated with Latin styles such as bongos and congas to Ethiopian music. In New York City he founded the Ethiopian Quintet (comprised mostly of Puerto Ricans), recorded his first album in 1966 before returning to Addis Adaba at the end of the decade, where he blended Ethiopian traditional music with Latin jazz to create a unique hybrid he called "Ethio-jazz."

"I changed the whole Ethiopian music combining jazz and fusion with the Ethiopian five-tone scales," Mulatu told the New York Times in October 2005. " Since then my name has been on the very, very top of the Ethiopian musical scene."

Recently, Mulatu has been the center of renewed interest in the West through a compilation on the Parisian series "Ethiopiques" (Buda Musique) and a 10" 4-track compilation on the Soundway label of Brighton England. Most notably, a number of Mulatu's compositions were featured in director Jim Jarmush’s 2005 independent film "Broken Flowers," starring Bill Murray and Julie Delpy.

While he remains a ubiquitous presence in the Ethiopian music scene, as club owner, music school founder, radio DJ, composer, arranger and instrumentalist, Mulatu maintains strong Massachusetts connections. He frequently collaborates with the Massachusetts-based Either/Orchestra, one of jazz's longest running and most important large ensembles. Mulatu met them in 2004 when the orchestra was the first non-Ethiopian band to perform at the annual Ethiopian Music Festival in Addis Ababa.

And, Mulatu has just completed a 2007-08 Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard University, where his goals were to research how to develop the krarr, a traditional Ethiopian five-string instrument, with electronic music specialists; write an opera based on Ethiopian Coptic Church music written around AD 380, which will be conducted using the mekwamia, an ancient conducting stick; and write a book on the historical context of instruments used in the Ethiopian Coptic Church and their contribution to the development of world music.

The first section of Mulatu's "The Yared Opera," which blends old and new was premiered at Harvard's Sanders Theater in April 2008. Mulatu hopes future performances of the opera which is based in part on the chant of St. Yared, the founder of Ethiopian church music, will feature live musicians in concert with the electronic version, and staged at the rock churches of Lalibela, a holy city in northern Ethiopia.

Mulatu will return to MIT in April to follow up on projects started during this residency.

The Abramowitz Memorial Lecture, presented by the Office of the Arts, was established at MIT through the generosity and imagination of William L. Abramowitz '35 as a memorial to his father. It has been sustained since his death by the devoted interest of his wife and children. Since 1961, the Series has brought renowned performing artists and writers to MIT to perform, present public lectures, and collaborate with students in free programs.

March 6, 2008

By Corydon Ireland

Harvard News Office

It’s not easy to be a musician in most of the Third World, said legendary Ethiopian composer and musician Mulatu Astatke, who is a 2007-08 Radcliffe Fellow. Music is not typically taught in elementary schools, and in later life, opportunities for musicians are limited by poverty.

In Ethiopia “we have beautiful music, beautiful dance, and in general we have a beautiful culture — but little chance to develop,” said Mulatu (Ethiopians are generally referred to by their first names) in a Feb. 27 presentation.

The slight, soft-spoken composer was at Radcliffe’s 34 Concord Ave. Colloquium Room to give an audience of 70 a primer on Ethiopian contributions to world music — and on his own contributions as a transnational composer. (Mulatu originated a jazz fusion form known as Ethio-jazz. He recently composed music for the soundtrack of director Jim Jarmusch’s 2005 “Broken Flowers.”)

Early on, Mulatu wanted to be an engineer. But he went to high school in North Wales, where a rich arts curriculum allowed him to uncover his talent for music. “I found my calling there,” he said.

Then came more music schooling in London, before Mulatu moved to Boston, where in the late 1950s he was the first African student at the Berklee College of Music — “the only place in that time,” he said, to study jazz.

After further training in New York City, and more than a decade in the West, Mulatu moved back to Ethiopia, where he survived decades of civil war and the vagaries of changing political regimes. Mulatu taught for a living, though he was pressured out of one university job for promoting “imperialist music.” He also pioneered a groundbreaking radio music show in Addis Ababa and traveled frequently into the countryside to perform.

Today, the 67-year-old composer considers part of his musical mission to revive and improve upon the traditional instruments of his country. Modern groups are recording music based on Ethiopian rhythms and musical themes, said Mulatu, but none is reawakening the potential of traditional instruments.

For one, he pioneered the idea of increasing the number of strings on the krar, a bowl-shaped six-string lyre traditionally made of wood, cloth, and beads. He upgraded the instrument — now commonly amplified — to eight strings, then to 12.

If traditional instruments are limited, young players will turn to more versatile Western instruments — and lose a sense of their own culture, said Mulatu. There are ways to alter and improve the old, he said, without compromising the tonal qualities that underlie Ethiopian music.

The composer’s own signature instrument is the vibraphone, a set of graduated aluminum percussion bars that resemble a marimba or a xylophone. In Mulatu’s hands, said Kay Kaufman Shelemay, “the vibraphone becomes the dawal” — the resonant “bell stones” that call the faithful to prayer at Ethiopian churches. (Shelemay, also a Radcliffe Fellow this year, is Harvard’s G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and a professor of African and African American studies.)

After his Western training in music, Mulatu made a study of the complex layering of regional Ethiopian music traditions. It’s “a very diverse and a very [musically] rich country,” said Radcliffe Fellow Steven Kaplan, a professor of African studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At the presentation, he praised Mulatu for delving into lesser-known musical traditions among tribes in southern Ethiopia.

The composer once brought musicians from four different tribes together in an Addis Ababa television studio and orchestrated a cross-tribal fusion performance. Clips from that filming were among the several musical and video interludes played or shown during the Radcliffe event.

To the Western ear and eye, the wind instruments were captivating. They included long trumpetlike wooden horns called malakat and end-blown flutes that each produce one pitch and together a complex melody.

The ideal way “to explore multiple forms” of music, said Mulatu, is through jazz.

Performance opportunities like the one in Addis Ababa also give obscure musicians (many of them farmers) artistic exposure beyond their villages, he said. “These people have been deprived of being heard in the world, or even their own country.”

Performance is also one way of bringing Ethiopian music into the modern age, and to “give identity to modern Ethiopian music,” said Mulatu. “I’ve been writing music here to come up with that identity.” He described the Radcliffe experience — with its opportunities for reflection, collaboration, and composition — as “one of the best years of my life.”

Mulatu is writing music for an electronic opera, and the first section of it will premiere in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre April 14. “The Yared Opera” will blend the old and the new, and incorporate traditional chant texts in Ge’ez, the Ethiopian liturgical language.

Part of the opera score was sneak-previewed on DVD for the Radcliffe audience. It’s based in part on the chant of St. Yared, the founder of Ethiopian church music thought to date back to the sixth century. Mulatu hopes future performances will feature live musicians in concert with the electronic version, and staged at the rock churches of Lalibela, a holy city in northern Ethiopia.

While at Radcliffe, Mulatu is also working on an oral history project with Kaplan and Shelemay. The two scholars have recorded 11 sessions with him so far, including the Feb. 27 presentation. Kaplan and Shelemay sat on either side of him, and alternated asking questions.

The oral history sessions, including DVDs and recordings, will be added to a new collection on Ethiopian musicians in the United States that Shelemay is assembling for the Library of Congress. She called Mulatu an “ambassador” for Ethiopian artistic tradition.

The premiere of the first section of Mulatu Astatke’s ‘The Yared Opera’ is part of a free performance of his works by the Either/Orchestra at 8 p.m. April 14 in the Sanders Theatre. The concert is the final note of an April 13-14 Ethiopian Cultural Creativity Conference at Harvard, which features scholarly presentations on the visual, musical, and literary artistic contributions of the Ethiopian diaspora. For details, visit http://www.music.fas.harvard.edu/ethiopia.html.

Source: http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2008/03.06/11-astatke.htm

Mulatu Astatke

I'm not seeing the Jim Jarmusch film  until tonight, but acting on a tip from a friend with great taste, I bought the soundtrack yesterday. Talk about 'heavy rotation' --- I'm already in danger of wearing this CD out. And all because of an aging Ethiopian musician I'd never heard of!

Bear with me on this, because the ingredients sound...odd. Mulatu Astatke grew up in Ethiopia but went abroad to study jazz in America. He was influenced by Miles Davis and John Coltrane --- and by the organist Jimmy Smith. What he brought back to Ethiopia was a blend of soul and jazz. Which he then proceeded to blend, once more, with traditional Ethiopian music.

The result is easy to listen to and hard to describe. The horns play cool jazz figures; you could almost mistake them for clarinets. But under that is a groove that could have been created by Booker T and the MGs. And connecting the two are some Ethiopian chords that sound exotic, space-changing, hypnotic.

Think desert cha cha. Cuba goes to Memphis. Desert trance music.

Like nothing you have ever heard before.

Mulatu Astatke is the man in charge of all of it: He writes the music, arranges it, and plays piano, organ, vibes and percussion. Although the Golden Years of this Ethiopian music were ancient history --- from 1968 to 1974 --- Astatke is still a major figure in Ethiopian music, regularly playing and teaching. 

Happily, Jim Jarmusch is one of those directors who not only listens to a lot of music, but looks for a way to integrate it into his films.  "Music often leads me," he says. "I discovered Mulatu Astatke's music maybe seven years ago, and I was blown away by a few things I found that he had recorded in the late sixties. I was on a hunt for a number of years: I bought some vinyl; some of his jazz stuff; some Latin jazz recorded in the states; other Ethiopian stuff. And then I was like, "Oh, man, how can I get this music in a film? It's so beautiful and score-like." Then when I was writing, I was like, "Well, this neighbor [Jeffrey Wright] is Ethiopian-American, I can turn him on to the music."

There are other musicians on the soundtrack --- and four songs by Astatke. I'm told they're crucial to the feeling of the film. I already know they're crucial to my jaded ears, which perk up as soon as his songs start. And I feel quite sure I'll be ordering a CD with much more of his music: the highly-regarded 'Ethiopiques, Vol. 4: Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale, 1969-1974.'

You'll want to be the first on your block to hear this music. Not because of the 'hip' factor, though I won't pretend that's unimportant. But because of the pure pleasure --- this is very happy music, and happy in a smart way. Each time you listen, you hear a little more. With a hundred encounters, you may actually get what this genius is doing.


--- by Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com

Source: Headbutler.com

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent | The Boston Globe|  November 5, 2004

It's been decades since Mulatu Astatke has performed his so-called Ethio Jazz in the United States, back when he toured and recorded in the 1960s with his Ethiopian Quintet. But the arranger-composer will be doing so again Wednesday in Arlington at the Regent Theatre, in the first of three concerts with the Either/Orchestra.

A fusion of the traditional music of Mulatu's native Ethiopia and the jazz and Latin influences he picked up as a student in London and Boston in the late 1950s and early '60s, Ethio Jazz enjoyed its short, largely unnoticed heyday between Mulatu's return to Ethiopia from New York in 1968 and the rise of the Marxist dictatorship there in 1974, after which the recording industry in that country remained shuttered for years.

By then, Mulatu had become a major figure in Ethiopian music. He had done so by bringing home and introducing such Western instruments as a Hammond organ, vibes, congas, and timbales, and, more important, by adapting to traditional Ethiopian melodies the composing and arranging skills he had studied under Herb Pomeroy and others during a short stretch at the Berklee College of Music.

Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and others were experimenting with modal jazz at the time

Mulatu was studying jazz, and that and other influences shaped his Ethio Jazz.

''I still listen a lot to Gil Evans," says Mulatu by phone from his son's home in northern Virginia, recalling the musicians who affected him most in those seminal years. ''I love George Shearing very much -- I like his changes, I like his approach to his 12-tone music. I was listening a lot to Randy Weston. Coltrane I was listening to a lot. And Miles. Those are the people who really influenced me."

Mulatu's main challenge in combining traditional Ethiopian music with jazz, he says, involved integrating the pentatonic-scale-based melodies of Ethiopia with the 12 tones on which Western music is based. The result, to Western ears, has an eerie, exotic, almost trancelike feel to it, coupled with more familiar jazz, Latin, and soul rhythms and harmonies.

''Whatever you do," Mulatu says, ''if you touch the melody, then the whole thing's going to be changed. So the only thing you have to do to make this music interesting is to really work on the harmonic side of it. So I really worked on what I studied -- nice arrangements and nice voicings and nice soloing."

Mulatu's recorded output has, of course, been sparse. Still, it was recordings that serendipitously brought him together with the Either/Orchestra this past January, when the E/O capped off a two-week tour of the country by becoming the first non-Ethiopian band to perform at the annual Ethiopian Music Festival in Addis Ababa.

Russ Gershon, Either/Orchestra's leader, became smitten with Ethiopian music after acquiring several CDs from the French producer Francis Falceto's ''Ethiopiques" series, which included Mulatu work from the early '70s.

Gershon went on to include arrangements of Ethiopian tunes on the E/O CDs ''More Beautiful Than Death" and ''Afro-Cubism." Those got noticed by Falceto and led to an E/O appearance in Addis Ababa. (The E/O's live festival performances with various Ethiopian musicians, including Mulatu, will make up volume 21 or 22 of the ''Ethiopiques" series, says Gershon, and probably be released this spring.)

''There's not that long tradition of high-level jazz playing that they're coming out of," Gershon says of the Ethiopian instrumentalists he heard on disc, ''so there's a sort of simplicity to the playing that I really like. . . . It's sort of all vibe, all feeling, coming through relatively simple technique."

For his part, Mulatu, whose main performing instruments are vibraphone, piano, and percussion, is delighted after all these years to work with American musicians who combine high-caliber chops and a genuine affinity for his music.

''They feel this music," he says, ''and they really play it so nice."

Seeing ghosts
Halloween has come and gone, but the spirits of dear, departed jazz greats apparently live on at the Regattabar, where tonight and tomorrow the club's featured act goes by the title ''The Spirit of Django Reinhardt: Django Reinhardt Festival." The tribute is the latest incarnation of a marketing technique the R-bar has been employing quite a bit since being taken over by new management this past summer: using the big names of deceased legends to lure audiences for lesser-known talent. Previous events honored the music of Miles Davis, Frank Sinatra, and Dizzy Gillespie.

This weekend's show, though -- a spinoff of the annual Django Reinhardt Festival at Birdland in New York -- seems to take the trend further. Not only did Reinhardt's passing occur more than a half-century ago (Davis, Sinatra, and Gillespie all died in the 1990s), the musicians paying tribute to him are virtually ignored on the Regattabar's website promoting the concert, in favor of a short biography of Reinhardt. They are: Dorado Schmitt, lead guitar; ''Mayo" Hubert, rhythm guitar; Peter Beets, piano; Brian Torff, bass; and Johnny Frigo, violin.

Source: The Boston Globe