Hailu Mergia - Yene Mircha - VINYL LP

Dutch remastered reissue of 1972 album featuring Ray Barretto, Ron Carter, Hubert Laws, Billy Cobham, Stanley Clarke & John Tropea.

This is part of a mini-series on our competitively priced budget tag Fabulous under the banner of Jazz Legends, presenting some of great and influential names of jazz, with recordings drawn from the classic era of the genre's development between 1920 and 1950. Thomas InchFatsInch Waller was a hugely popular and equally influential pianist, organist, singer, composer and comedic entertainer during the formative decades of jazz, and his unique style, and memorable hit songs earned him a special place in the world of entertainment, transcending the boundaries between jazz and wider popular culture, and enjoying success on both sides of the Atlantic. Waller was a pioneer of the stride piano style distinctively associated with Harlem, and it was the basis of many of the hits he wrote, which have become perennially popular standards such as InchHoneysuckle RoseInch and InchAin't MisbehavingInch, among many others. This collection traces his career from his first recordings in the early '20s through to just before his untimely death in 1943, when he appeared in the movie InchStormy WeatherInch, and features him performing both on piano and organ, singing hits recorded with quintet or sextet InchFats Waller & His RhythmInch, and also accompanying Adelaide Hall. It's an enjoyable snapshot of a great artist's work.

It's been a little over ten years since Hailu Mergia re-emerged on the international music scene. Following the first in a series of his classic recordings reissued in collaboration with Awesome Tapes From Africa, Mergia assembled a band and began performing live again after many years driving a cab in Washington, DC. His first show back appeared on the front page of the New York Times along with a stellar review and he took off from there performing his flavor of Ethiopian jazz all over the world in the years since, including Radio City Music Hall and Montreal Jazz Festival.Finally, we have a recorded document of the keyboard player's powerful DC-based trio-which practices each weekend in his basement-featuring Kenneth Joseph on drums and Alemseged Kebede on bass. Beautifully captured at one of their fiery live shows at the venerable Brooklyn non-profit cultural center Pioneer Works on July 1, 2016, the concert was recorded by PW staff and mixed by Ted Young with mastering by ATFA's expert audio extraction collaborator Jessica Thompson. The performance clarifies what many people across the globe already know in his fifth decade of music-making Hailu Mergia continues to push the boundaries of his remarkable abilities.Mergia and his veteran band energetically and playfully unpeel layer after layer of harmonic and rhythmic interest out of a spectrum of Ethiopian repertoire. Modern jazz demands constant reinvention and improvisation, night after night creating new works out of known modes and classic standards. This band is unstoppable when it comes to turning age-old melodies (like InchTizitaInch or InchAnchihoye LeneInch) upside down and inside out until they emerge as molten new works, often spontaneously. Mergia's original compositions (like InchYegle NeshInch) shine brighter than ever here as well. Moving from keyboard to organ to accordion to melodica, he deftly s