Hailu Mergia and Low Mentality at Le Poisson Rouge

The sound is good… the sound is modern and old fashioned. The melodies are very nice melodies, so because of this, everybody had some kind of…. nostalgia.” That’s how Hailu Mergia describes the sound of his album Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument, the most recent release on the Awesome Tapes From Africa label. In short, Mergia is a keyboardist, arranger, composer, and veteran of the Addis scene. “Nostalgia” is an apt word—it’s the rough translation of the Amharic word “tezeta,” which is also used to describe a distinct style of Ethiopian song (articulated in the Ethiopiques series as “blues and ballads”)...

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The sound is good… the sound is modern and old fashioned. The melodies are very nice melodies, so because of this, everybody had some kind of…. nostalgia.” That’s how Hailu Mergia describes the sound of his album Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument, the most recent release on the Awesome Tapes From Africa label. In short, Mergia is a keyboardist, arranger, composer, and veteran of the Addis scene. “Nostalgia” is an apt word—it’s the rough translation of the Amharic word “tezeta,” which is also used to describe a distinct style of Ethiopian song (articulated in the Ethiopiques series as “blues and ballads”). Like nostalgia, there’s something magical about Mergia’s music that is hard to put a finger on, difficult to grasp… it’s beautiful, familiar, but bearing the disconnect of something past being remembered.

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