This year the entertainment business returned to some form of normality after the hard slog of lockdowns and lack of customers. It was good to see music lovers back at festivals and clubs. And the best festive season present of all was the performance of Ethiopian legend Hailu Mergia and his trio at Studio Lam on Dec 21.
Mergia was the leader of one of Addis Ababa's top bands in the 1970s, the Walias Band, which masterfully blended Ethiopian folk music with US funk (especially influenced by King Curtis and Maceo Parker). The arrival of the Derg dictatorship meant that the band had to play and record instrumentals as lyrics critical of the government would lead to severe sanctions; the standout feature of the band's music was Mergia's sublime organ and accordion sound.
During a US tour in the 1980s, he and several other musicians stayed in the country and Mergia has remained a resident there since. He stopped playing music in the 1990s and opened a restaurant in Washington DC. From 1998 he drove a taxi, often practising his keyboard playing in his taxi during breaks. The re-release of Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument in 2013 by Awesome Tapes From Africa brought him to a new international audience, and as he told me after the gig at Studio Lam, he has not had to drive a taxi since then -- he's playing around the world, making up for lost time.
The show at Studio Lam to a small but very appreciative audience was excellent. Mergia's jazz- and Ethiopian-inflected funk sound is catchy and full of dreamy keyboard riffs; Mergia also showed his chops on the accordion, which I particularly liked, and the melodica. I do hope he will be invited back to Thailand with a full band (to get an idea of what this sounds like, interested readers should look for his 2020 release Yene Mircha).
In 2022, we lost several major stars. National Artist Waipot Phetsupan passed away in January 2022. The "Raja Pleng Lae" (King of Lae Song) whose distinctive, hard-edged and very powerful voice thrilled luk thung music fans from 1962 left a legacy of amazing music. Styles ranged from lae to northeast lam and to all the classic central Thai folk styles including full-band central Thai luk thung (fronting his band with fellow National Artist Kwanjit Sriprachan). Listen to his hits Ding Dong, Taeng Thai Tai and, one of my favourites, 21 Mithunaa-yon. Another central Thai pleng luk thung singer, Sornpet Sornsuphan, also died in 2022.
Sadly, the influential songwriter/producer, DJ, bandleader, concert promoter and stalwart in the promotion of the culture and music of Isan, Surin Paksiri, also passed away last year. Paksiri was a go-to mentor for me when I wanted to understand ramwong or how he led the creation of the distinctive luk thung Isan sound.
And fans of Irish music here in Bangkok will also be mourning the loss of Bangkok resident Mick Moloney, the banjo player and distinguished professor at New York University.
All these great artists and friends will be greatly missed, but we do have the amazing musical legacies each one of them left for us to enjoy.
I will be reviewing the best releases from last year and what is hot for 2023 in my next column, as the charts have only just come out. On my turntable at the end of the year are a number of amazing albums and tracks. I really like the Iftin Band from Somalia and Ostinato Records' latest compilation, Iftin Band -- Mogadishu's Finest: The Al-Urba Sessions, which follows up on a 2017 release of Somalian popular music on the same label, Sweet As Broken Dates. I also keep playing the amazing Mexican collection Saturno 2000 which features a genre of 1970s music, rebejada, that appears to have been born in Monterre, and has a catchy rhythm similar to Colombian cumbia, hence the genre is sometimes called cumbias rebajadas.
Finally, thanks to Mr Don of Dasa Book Café, I have got my hands on Oumou Sangare's latest album Timbuktu (World Circuit), which is my favourite of 2022. Her ninth album was recorded in Baltimore, where she was stuck during lockdown in 2020. Sangare's voice is as powerful and evocative as ever on the album, with tracks like Wassulu Don and Kele Magni as standouts. My only complaint is that the album is only 42 minutes long and does not have the variety of the previous two albums, Acoustic and Mogoya. Still, for fans of West African and Malian music, it's well worth checking out.
World Beat wishes readers a safe, healthy and fun-packed 2023.
John Clewley can be contacted at clewley.john@gmail.com.
