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From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Tue Dec 28 2010 - 12:12:59 EST
http://genevalunch.com/blog/2010/12/28/world-given-rare-chance-to-hear-eritrean-music/
Posted by :: Ellen Wallace on 28 December 2010 at 13:20
World given rare chance to hear Eritrean music
*Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch)* – Eritrea’s new album, “Eritrea’s Got
Soul”, is one of the world’s best holiday gifts, for the power of the
unlikely recordings to tell a story from a small African nation. Three
international albums in 50 years for a population of five million people
with nine languages who have their own musical heritage but who have known
little besides war led to French musician Bruno Blum working with Eritrean
authorities to create a band called Asmara All Stars and to convince German
company Out Here to produce the 13 tracks.
Government authorities, particularly authoritarian ones, are not often part
of a popular new music album. Many of the musicians in the band are civil
servants, regularly called on to play for the army, according to Radio
France International’s (RFI) David Brown. Blum insisted that he be given
free rein, including bringing in a few musicians who are not civil servants.
Brown writes that “French blues guitarist, songwriter, producer, music
author, painter and cartoonist Bruno Blum was invited in 2006 by the
official Eritrean Cultural Affairs Office to create a modern yet traditional
sound from a country that has faced a cultural and economic blockade for the
past decade.”
Five thousand European-based Eritreans in February 2010 gathered in front of
the United Nations in Geneva, with other protesters marching in the US and
Australia against what the groups labelled US-led UN sanctions against
Eritrea. The UN Security Council in December 2009 had voted an arms embargo
and other sanctions, including a ban on travel by senior Eritrean officials,
for destabilizing neighbouring Somalia.
World attention was drawn to Eritrea in June 2010 when a group of boat
people from the country were dramatically rescued, with Geneva-based refugee
organization UNHCR highly critical “of rescue operations in the region,
where Italy, Malta and Libya have disputed who is responsible for picking up
boat people in distress,” GenevaLunch reported.
RFI’s Brown recounts the tale of how the 14-member band put together the
music and recorded it, despite many odds, from bureaucratic fights to
marrying quarreling music styles.
Blum will be known to many English-speaking music fans for his version of
Bob Marley’s “War”, featuring Haile Selassie’s original speech and the
Wailers.
Eritrea’s history is a long and rich saga linked to its mineral resources,
closeness to Egypt during the time of the pharoahs and its 1,600km of Red
Sea coastline. It became an Italian colony in 1890, 21 years after the
opening of the Suez Canal, then part of Italian East Africa in 1936, along
with Ethiopia and Sudan. It was ruled by the British under a UN mandate from
1941 to 1951, and, shortly after independence as a federation with its
larger neighbour Ethiopia, was annexed as a province of the latter in 1952.
“Lack of regard for the Eritrean population led to the formation of an
independence movement in the early 1960s (1961), which erupted into a
30-year war against successive Ethiopian governments that ended in 1991,”
according to Wikipedia. “Following a UN-supervised referendum in Eritrea in
which the Eritrean people overwhelmingly voted for independence, Eritrea
declared its independence and gained international recognition in 1993.”
The two nations fought again in 1998, a two-year border dispute that remains
unresolved since UN forces pulled out, and Eritrea also went to war with
Yemen. It has spent much of the past decade trying to feed its population
and rebuild the economy, but with an unusually high proportion of workers in
the civil service.
The country’s reputation internationally has suffered from a lack of
information, with Reporters without Borders saying there is not a single
foreign correspondent, and giving it a lower media rating even than North
Korea. Travellers, including diplomats, have trouble obtaining permission to
travel outside the capital of Asmara.
Eritrea’s single-party government continues in power despite a constitution
that calls for a multi-party government.
*Links to reviews of “Eritrea’s Got Soul”:*
*Deanne Sole / Pop Matters (
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/134144-asmara-all-stars-eritreas-got-soul/)
,
Richie Troughton / The
Quietus<http://thequietus.com/articles/05485-asmara-all-stars-eritrea-s-got-soul-review>
* (
http://thequietus.com/articles/05485-asmara-all-stars-eritrea-s-got-soul-review
)
*Album (sample tracks, for-pay downloads)*
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