Arat Kilo, Mamani Keita & Mike Ladd Visions Of Selam

Selam means 'peace' in Amharic, the language commonly spoken in Ethiopia. Peace on you, peace for this world that knows it so little and needs it so much. It is an aspiration for everything, but also, as in North Africa where its equivalent is ‘salam’, a greeting to the
interlocutor, an invitation to fraternity. With this third album, Arat Kilo addresses us its greeting as well as a wish for universal peace. It's not a sign of a new beginning after two already exhilarating recording adventures. On the contrary, it is that of a blossoming in the form of an opening.
An openness that is not accompanied by any renunciation or compromise. The group, which brings together six French musicians passionate about ethiojazz, has made sure not to get away from its favourite field, these sweaty funks and fivelegged jazz strangely twisted in the witchcraft of Swingin' Addis, a brief parenthesis today considered as a golden age where some Ethiopian producers and musicians took advantage of a loophole in the censorship system established by Haïlé Selassié to unite traditional turns - the only
ones authorized by the Negusse Negest regime - with Western jazz, soul and pop. In this album, Arat Kilo never leaves Addis Ababa in the early 70s where charming singers and electric orchestras developed, in an almost clandestine way, heady melodies and melodies full of mystery. The four characteristic ethiojazz scales are found there, which blend the ornamental chiselings and harmonic cement of each title, on a par with the associations of timbres and rhythms inherited from this composite aesthetic. But the band managed to bring to fruition the evolution that was taking shape in its previous album: on the one hand by accentuating the dancing character of its compositions - following an almost natural vocation, so much so that the prodigious drums of Florent Berteau, the bass of Samuel Hirsh, the percussion of Gérald Bonnegrace, the guitar of Fabien Girard, Aristide Gonçalves' trumpet and keyboards and Michael Havard's saxophones and flutes seemed predisposed to fit together to form a fabulous groover machine in every tone, every meter -, on the other hand, by incorporating with amazing ease two singers used to walking across very different horizons, Mamani Keita and Mike Ladd.