“Like many great jazz originals liberated by the idiom’s openness to all manner of borrowings and hybrids, the Ethiopian multi-instrumentalist and composer Mulatu Astatke created a new sound by unlikely alchemy – between the Latin grooves and jazz-rock wah-wah guitars he heard as a student in the States in the 60s, and the wide-interval modes and fluid rhythms of his homeland’s ancient traditions. ”
