Music and Memory: Sitting Down With Hailu Mergia Raghav Raj Arts & Culture Editor There’s something so spectacular, so sacred, so sublime in watching the great Hailu Mergia work his hands around the keys. The legendary Ethiopian composer, bandleader, and multi-instrumentalist speaks gently, and he moves with all the patience you’d expect from a 77-year-old. Whether he’s playing the organ, accordion, or his melodica, he breathes beautiful life into his instrument, imbuing every crevice with warm streams of light, locking into the grooves of his backing band, sending brilliant little filigrees into the stratosphere as his fingers glide along the keyboards. Mergia’s story is a long, fascinating one, and it’s worth repeating: in the 1970’s, as the moonlight years of Haile Selassie’s constitutional monarchy gave way to a coup and subsequent military dictatorship rule under the Derg, he was a fixture of the famed Walias Band, which built its reputation playing shows in Addis and had grown into arguably the most popular band in the country. In 1981, the Walias Band went on tour in the United States; instead of returning to the dictatorship in Ethiopia, Mergia stayed with three other bandmates in the US, formed a new group called the Zula Band, and studied music at Howard University before stepping away from performing in 1991. In the years afterwards, Mergia opened a restaurant with friends in the Ethiopian community in DC, reconnected with an old lover from Ethiopia — his now-wife, who answered the phone when I called him — and later bought a taxi cab, which he drove for over two decades. In 2013, Mergia got a phone call from Awesome Tapes From Africa founder and label head Brian Shimkovitz, who had stumbled upon a cassette that Mergia had recorded with the accordion while studying music at Howard in 1985 called Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument: Shemonmuanaye. He wanted to reissue it with Mergia’s permission, and asked if Mergia was interested in playing music again. Mergia said yes, and the rest was history. The resurgence of his musical career is something that Mergia views with deep, profound gratitude.
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The Grape
It was crystal-clear during that blissful Saturday night performance in Oberlin’s Dionysus Disco, as a packed crowd of students, locals, and community members from the greater Cleveland area huddled together to escape the cold and experience the man’s music, Mergia beaming with genuine delight as every song was punctuated with raucous, adoring applause. With his frequent collaborators in tow (Kenneth Joseph on the drums, Alemseged Kebede on bass), Mergia played an invigorating set that spanned the breadth of his discography, drawing from early works like the title track of his fan-favorite 1978 record with the Dahlak band, Wede Harer Guzo (which spurred the crowd into a joyous singalong), as well as late-career highlights from 2018’s Lalu Bela and Yene Mircha, an album that dropped right as the pandemic arrived in March 2020. A couple days before the show, I had the privilege of sitting down with Mergia over the phone to discuss performing during Ethiopia’s military dictatorship, finding a home in America, the music that inspires him, and more. The following interview has been edited for clarity and length. You got your start in the Walias Band, which was the biggest band in Ethiopia during those ‘Swinging Addis’ years. What was the nightlife like back then? It was nice! We had a good time. Every time we had a show, we really enjoyed playing music for the hotel. We were actually playing in different places, the Walias Band, until finally we stayed in the Hilton Hotel for a long time. We always enjoyed playing music, and like any other life, we were having fun. Whenever we played, we always had a nice crowd. People were coming there to enjoy the music, just like the normal nightlife in other places. We didn’t really have special things, but we were just doing our job, and people really enjoyed it.
During this time, you worked with Mulatu Astatke — what was that experience like? Honestly, I didn’t really play in the band with Mulatu. He was my friend. He used to come and we used to meet every now and then, and we just did some recordings in general. He was not playing with Walias Band, but we had a good time! We love each other, and we still are in contact even now. In 1974, the revolution happened in Ethiopia, and the Derg took over. What was that experience like, both in your music and in your life, when all those things suddenly changed? Well, because we used to play in the Hilton Hotel, we were playing the same kind of music that we used to play before the revolution. It didn’t make that much difference to us, and we still kept playing the latest music because most of our crowd in the Hilton was tourists and diplomats. People came from different countries, and they wanted to listen to Ethiopian music, as well as different kinds of music, so we were always playing standards, blues, soul music, and jazz. Because of that, as I saw it, I didn’t really see that much of a difference, because we were always doing different kinds of music and people were always coming to listen. Of course, when you have a revolution, there is some kind of life standard that has changed in the country, I know that. By 12 o’clock, everything had to be closed, and everything was going to be changed. But in the music business, we didn’t really have that many changes. We were just doing what we were supposed to do. Life is different, of course, but we have to do what we have to do. I saw a video with your song “Anchin Kfu Ayinkash” that said in Ethiopia, during the military dictatorship, if you had words in your music they had to praise the government. The video suggested that your music was instrumental in an act of protest. Is that true? That music came in 1975. When we made that song with Dahlak Band, we were collecting music