ADDIS ABABA

The lights caught the brass section first, and then Mulatu Astatke, 82 years old, walked to the center of the stage at the Adwa Victory Memorial Museum, and the room understood the night had changed register.

The Mulatu Astatke Legacy Concert, billed as his farewell to large-scale touring, drew thousands to the Ethiopian capital as the centerpiece of Craft Addis, a pan-African creative economy and innovation festival organized by Zeleman Communications.

The evening moved between performance and ceremony, between jazz and something older and harder to name.

Mulatu has spent six decades building a genre from first principles. Ethio-Jazz fuses Ethiopia’s five-note pentatonic scales with the harmonic vocabulary of Western jazz and the rhythmic architecture of Latin music, and the result belongs to no single tradition.

Mulatu calls it a form of “musical science,” a phrase he uses seriously and not metaphorically, with the science lying in the precision required to blend forms without allowing one to consume another.

Born in Jimma, southwestern Oromia Region, Ethiopia, Mulatu was musically trained in the UK and the United States, where he combined his jazz and Latin music interests with traditional Ethiopian music.

The evening opened with a documentary tracing that science from his early studies at Trinity College of Music in London and Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he became the first African student enrolled, through the recordings of Ethiopia’s musical golden age in the 1970s.

International recognition came later still, when director Jim Jarmusch placed his compositions at the centre of the 2005 film Broken Flowers, a film that carried Ethio-Jazz to audiences his records had not reached.

When Mulatu took the stage with his ten-member London-based band, Steps Ahead, classics including “Yekermo Sew” transported the audience to the Addis Ababa of the 1960s, when Ethiopian jazz was young and the continent’s confidence in its own modernity was equally fresh.

The vibraphone carried each melody with the deliberate patience of a musician who has never confused speed with depth.

Between pieces, Mulatu spoke, addressing the younger generation directly and asking them to protect what their culture had built before widening the frame, as he often does, to a question that has occupied him for years.

“It’s not only for me,” he told the audience. “But for those great Africans, for our great scientists who have done so much to the world, which they haven’t been really recognized as they should be recognized.”

He spoke of innovators whose contributions to global knowledge remain uncredited, unnamed, unhoused in any institution that would teach children to remember them.

“There are so many great scientists in Africa,” he said. “Please give respect, love them, and follow what they are doing.”

The question behind that appeal is one Mulatu has posed on stages across the world for decades. Who created the Eskista, the Masinqo, the Washint?

While other nations build official histories around the inventors of their cultural forms, Ethiopia and much of Africa have left those origins largely unmarked, and Mulatu’s argument is about knowledge, ownership, and what a continent loses when it does not document itself.

The World’s Verdict on Mulatu Astatke

Craft Addis opened its May 1 ceremony by presenting Mulatu with a Lifetime Achievement Award, the festival’s formal recognition of six decades of innovation and global impact.

“It was a profound privilege to honor the father of Ethio-Jazz for his decades of innovation and his global impact on the creative economy,” the festival said in a social media post the following day.

France awarded Mulatu the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2019, presented in Addis Ababa by Culture Minister Franck Riester, and Italy conferred the Ordine della Stella d’Italia in 2016, both honors given by other states for a contribution that originated here on the continent.

In December 2025, he performed in London in what served as a European farewell before the May 1 concert in Addis Ababa closed the circle.

Mulatu remains active at the African Jazz Village, which he founded in Addis Ababa, a center for training, archiving, and live performance, and has lectured at Harvard and MIT, making clear that his retirement from touring does not signal withdrawal from the work.

At 82, he is still asking the same question he asked in the 1960s, and the continent still does not have a complete answer.

As the brass faded and the vibraphone settled into silence, the audience rose, and the music, along with the argument it carries, will outlast the touring schedule by some distance.