There is a clarity to Ethiopian pianist Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru’s music that transforms her skeletal playing into founts of emotion. It permeates every song on Éthiopiques 21, the 2006 compilation that highlighted solo piano music from four of her albums. “Mother’s Love” ambles casually, frequently punctuated by circular, trilling melodies that echo the gentle and guiding hand of an attentive mother. “The Last Tears of a Deceased” traverses passages of varying turbulence, and its most emphatic moments sound like a sudden wave of tears arriving mid-reflection. These two songs, among others she composed, were dedicated to family members who passed away. It was apt that the CD began with “The Homeless Wanderer,” about a vagabond assuaging their worries through song.
Music always had this immediate, ineffable quality for Emahoy. After an arson attempt on her family home in Addis Ababa when she was 5, she was sent by her father—a political reformer and public intellectual—to live in Switzerland. It was there that she attended her first concert. Overcome with emotion, she approached the musician to share her gratitude; he encouraged her to play the piano, which she later took up and considered her “greatest friend” during adolescence. After Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935, she and her family were taken to various locales throughout their home country and Italy, eventually landing at a monastery in Mercogliano. Emahoy played the organ there, singing hymns with nuns. Over the next several years, her religious fervor grew, and she became a nun herself at Ethiopia’s Amba Geshen, a holy mountain said to host a fragment of the True Cross.
Emahoy’s itinerant life and spirituality gave shape to a singular musical sensibility mixing the Western classical composers she loved (Beethoven, Chopin, Strauss) with the Ethiopian secular and sacred music that was around her. Mississippi Records’ newest dispatch, Church of Kidane Mehret, stands out among their recent string of Emahoy reissues by focusing on her most explicitly religious batch of songs. It culls from two different LPs—the 1972 album of the same name, and 1963’s Der Sang Des Meeres, which was the source for four songs on Éthiopiques—but it doesn’t reach the ecstatic highs of her best-known music. Take the longest track, the 11-minute pipe-organ epic “Via Dolorosa, XIth Station of the Cross.” Its title refers to Jesus’ crucifixion, but the drama that should be on display—of grief and hope, sorrow and glory—is nowhere to be found. Chords progress in a steady fashion, the dynamic range is limited, and every note congeals into a vague mush of sacrosanct verve.
