Haunting, eerie, otherworldly: epithets for Ethiopian jazz often fail to capture the sheer vibrant joy of the music that flourished in the country from the late ‘60s through the early ‘70s. When a young music student named Mulatu Astatke tried his hand at marrying traditional Ethiopian music with jazz instrumentation, the explosive combination found fertile ground in Addis Ababa, until a military dictatorship cut the moment short. Buda’s Ethiopiques series revived this neglected music in the late ‘90s, and now a new generation of musicians is taking inspiration from the genre’s pioneers, many of whom continued to perform into the 21st century.