Looking back at the path that took her from Santa Cruz to Boston to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, violinist Kaethe Hostetter sees opportunities seized and creative gambits that hit pay dirt. She’s also clear that the creation of Qwanqwa, the singular quintet featuring four of Ethiopia’s most acclaimed and experimental-minded traditional musicians, wasn’t the result of a carefully laid plan.
“In hindsight you can make a plot, but while it’s happening it’s impulse and opportunity,” said Hostetter while relaxing with the band at a motel pool in Ivins, Utah, in the midst of an extensive tour featuring some four-dozen dates across the country. She makes her hometown debut with Qwanqwa Oct. 13 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz followed by performances in Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage Oct. 14, and Healdsburg’s Little Saint Oct. 15.
Rather than taking out student loans to go to music school, kept herself unfettered by debt so that she could follow her muse wherever it led. Plunging into Boston’s creatively roiling acoustic music scene, she ended up helping found Debo Band in the late aughts.
Led by Ethiopian-American saxophonist Danny Mekonnen, the sprawling 10-to-12-piece group gained an avid national following with a rollicking sound rooted in Ethio-jazz and Ethiopian folk rhythms while also drawing on far-flung cadences from sources like Balkan music, punk and acid rock. When the group made its first trip to Ethiopia in 2009 she decided to she wanted to stay there.
“I wanted to follow my instrument and let my musical journey go wherever it would take me,” Hostetter said. “When Debo went to Ethiopia it wasn’t that I was leaving the band behind. I could stay and be the representative in Addis. I came back and performed a lot and would always bring new music, injecting what I was hearing straight from Addis.”
As Debo’s fanbase grew and the band toured incessantly she missed a lot of gigs, but came back for the summer festival season every year. In Ethiopia, she studied Amharic, one of the ethnically diverse nation’s five official languages, and sought to connect and play with Addis’ leading traditional musicians.
“I was mostly trying to collaborate with every traditional musician I could find,” Hostetter said. “I was searching for experimental minds and fluency in tradition, which can be seen as opposites. But I was giving it time while I was learning the language, which really helped get deeper into the music because like Amharic the melodies are so syncopated, so that helped unlock the rhythms.”
By 2012 Hostetter’s search for experimental traditionalists had coalesced in Qwanqwa, which is the Amharic word for “language.” The name reflects the way the band’s innovative string-based sound flows from a series of conversations, drawing on traditional melodies and rhythms collected from different Ethiopian regions, as well as influences from neighboring Somalia, jazz and other styles.
While Hostetter plays five-string electric violin, the band is based on an array of Ethiopian traditional instruments with Endris Hassen on mesenko (one-string fiddle), Bubu Teklemariam on bass krar (Ethiopian lyre), Selamnesh Zemene on vocals, and Misale Legesse on kebero (goat-skin drum). One reason why Qwanqwa has forged such a powerful sound is that the musicians had longstanding relationships before they connected with Hostetter.
They all play together in the hugely popular Ethiocolor led by the dynamic Melaku Belay, a sensational dancer, entrepreneur and activist who performs internationally. He owns the club where the a plugged-in combo performs on Fridays, and supports a school for street kids. As Legesse explained, the top-shelf players in Addis often cover a lot of musical territory.
“I have a lot of chances to play for traditional groups as a percussionist,” he said. “I play experimental stuff with other musicians in Europe, Ethio-jazz from the 1980s, and Latin and West African music in different fusions. But with Qwanqwa, we take very small seeds from the traditional sources we’ve collected and build it into something new. We all compose and arrange together. For me, it’s completely different than other bands.”
While the Addis scene is once again back in full swing, it came to a screeching halt during the pandemic, which led Hostetter to move back to Santa Cruz with her family. Qwanqwa had just released a new album, “Qwanqwa Volume 3,” which is the project the group is focusing on during their first U.S. tour. But they’ve already got a whole new set of music recorded, mixed and mastered. As Hostetter explores new avenues, like a collaboration with Debo accordionist Marié Abe, she’s tending her abiding ties to Addis.
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
QWANQWA
When & where: 7 p.m. Oct. 13 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center, 320-2 Cedar St., Santa Cruz; $31.50-$36.75; www.kuumbwajazz.org; 8 p.m. Oct. 14 at Freight & Salvage, 2020 Addison St., Berkeley; $20-$24; www.thefreight.org
Source: www.mercurynews.com