Mulatu Astatke

Presented by Blue Note Jazz Festival in promotional partnership with World Music Institute

Two Shows: Wednesday, June 19 & Thursday, June 20 – SOLD OUT

New Show Added – Tuesday, June 18

Doors: 6 PM | Show: 8 PM

With DJ Henri

Sony Hall – 235 W 46th Street, Manhattan

VIP Reserved Seating
$89 Advance | $100 Day of Show
Guaranteed Seating in Designated Section – First Come, First Serve

Standing Room Only
$49 Advance | $55 Day of Show

Mulatu Astatke is an Ethiopian musician and arranger best known as the father of Ethio-jazz. Born in the western Ethiopian city of Jimma, Mulatu trained in London, New York City, and Boston where he combined his jazz and Latin music interests with traditional Ethiopian music and became the first African student to enroll at Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music from where he received an honorary degree in 2012. Astatke led his band while playing vibraphone and conga drums—instruments that he introduced into Ethiopian popular music— other percussion instruments, keyboards, and organ. His albums focus primarily on instrumental music, and Astatke appears on all three known albums of instrumentals that were released during Ethiopia’s Golden ’70s. He collaborated with many notable artists in both countries, arranging and playing on recordings by Mahmoud Ahmed, and appearing as a special guest with Duke Ellington during a tour of Ethiopia in 1973. His Western audience expanded even further when the 2005 Jim Jarmusch film Broken Flowers featured seven of Astatke’s songs. Hip-hop artists have also sampled Astatke’s music extensively, for example in the works of Nas, Damian Marley, Kanye West, Cut Chemist, and Knaan. He toured with US band Either/Orchestra in 2006 and in 2008 recorded an album with the Heliocentrics and completed a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard University, where he worked on modernizations of traditional Ethiopian instruments and premiered a portion of a new opera, The Yared Opera.

DJ Henri spins African and Caribbean sounds at venues including Summerstage, the Apollo Theater, Brooklyn Bowl, and elsewhere. He’s been booked to open for World Music legends like Salif Keita, Femi Kuti, Vieux Farka Toure, and many others, as well as artists from DR Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, South Africa, Niger, Haiti, Senegal, Cabo Verde, Ghana, Ethiopia, Morocco, Sudan, Gambia, Zimbabwe, Mauritania, Cuba, Guadeloupe, Dominica, Antigua, and Benin. For several years, he opened “Desert Blues” shows for the World Music Institute. His station Radio Africa Online is the longest-running African all-music station online, he writes a column for afropop.org, and his podcast, Radio Africa Online Mixes, is featured in Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, and elsewhere, enjoying more than 25 terabytes of traffic annually.