Hailu Mergia

An innovative Ethiopian keyboardist, accordionist, and bandleader, Hailu Mergia rose to prominence in the early '70s fronting the Walias Band, an instrumental funk and jazz ensemble and fixture of the Addis Ababa hotel circuit. Immigrating to the U.S. in the early '80s, Mergia issued a series of homemade solo releases while working as a taxi driver, later rediscovered by the Awesome Tapes from Africa label, whose reissues in the 2010s helped him mount a successful late-career surge that resulted in the 2018 comeback album Lala Belu. In the early part of his career, Mergia and the Walias Band could be found backing prominent singers and playing lengthy nightclub sets of their own mixture of hard funk, traditional music, and jazz. The group would often play all night in Ethiopia's capital, catering to a locked-in crowd skirting the revolutionary country's early curfew. In 1981, they became the first modern Ethiopian group to tour the U.S. and, while major stateside success eluded them,...