Department of Music Lecture: "The Rise and Fall of the Azmaribet: Traditional Music and Urban Imaginaries in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia"

John Walsh, Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, University of California, Berkeley

 Title
The Rise and Fall of the Azmaribet: Traditional Music and Urban Imaginaries in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Abstract

In 1992 Ethiopia’s transitional government dissolved a curfew that prevented gathering at night for nearly 17 years. In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital city, new forms of nightlife blossomed. The most prominent of these was the rise in venues for the performance of music by a caste of hereditary musicians known as azmaris. These new venues, called azmaribets, represented not only an expansion of social freedom, but also an innovation in the use of urban space itself, as these musicians secured land rights for the first time in the city’s history. However, a generation later the azmaribet has nearly evaporated, with all but a single venue closing after neoliberal forms of urban governance were enacted in service of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s vision of the “developmental state.” 

Following the rise and decline of the azmaribet, this paper explores the conditions of possibility for traditional music within the shifting composition of Addis Ababa’s urban everyday between 1992-2020. With an understanding of the “everyday” as the “condition(s) stipulated for the legibility of forms, obtained by means of functions [and] inscribed within structures” (Lefebvre 1987: 9) what does the “azmaribet,” as an urban form, make legible in the context of an everyday in flux? This paper explores how the azmaribet mediates urban histories, political trajectories, and aesthetic orders in Addis Ababa. Through ethnographic inquiry with owners of these venues, I follow how azmaris reconfigured the conditions of their musical labor during this period. With particular attention to the last remaining venue, a small club named Fendika, I demonstrate how the azmaribet continues to territorialize notions of tradition amidst shifting cultural and material terrain. 

Biography

As an ethnomusicologist, John Walsh is broadly interested in the relationships between music and cities. Specifically, his work explores the music scene as a flexible form of collective expressive culture that articulates relations between sociality, materiality, and aesthetics. His current research focuses on contemporary music scenes in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia under conditions of political transformation. Walsh received his B.M. in Percussion Performance from Centenary College of Louisiana, his M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago, and his PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of California, Berkeley before joining the Mead Witter School of Music in 2023. His research has been supported through two Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, the Cota Robles Fellowship, The John L. Simpson Memorial Research Fellowship, the Rocca Pre-Dissertation Research Grant, and UC Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies and Center for African Studies. His talk today is a chapter in progress for his current book project, titled “Revolutionary Nightlife: Music Scenes, Infrastructures, and Urban Transformation in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.”