The piano style of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou – a classically-trained violinist in her youth who became a nun at the age of twenty-one and spent the next decade living within a hilltop monastery, eventually settling in an Ethiopian Orthodox convent in Jerusalem before the compilation series Éthiopiques in 2006 which focused primarily on tizita and Ethio-jazz shone a spotlight on her discrete yet syncretic and utterly spellbinding manner of playing – has been variously described as somewhere between the winding repetitions and waif melodies of Erik Satie and the tremulous blues of Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington, combining her learning in the Western classical tradition with the ancient liturgical refrains of the Coptic Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the open-ended pentatonic scales of so much secular Ethiopian music. While her recordings have funded orphanages back home in Ethiopia since the early sixties, the global interest in her art spurred by the Éthiopiques volume has seen her dubbed ‘the honky-tonk nun’ and lauded as one of the most distinctive pianists in all of contemporary classical music.
Collaborating with Emahoy prior to her death last March at the age of ninety-nine years old, with access to a trove of manuscripts and cassettes which she carried with her in 1986 as she entered into exile in Jerusalem, now the archival label Mississippi Records which bids to fill in our collective blanks has unearthed a gem in the form of the esteemed pianist’s first vocal album. Composed and recorded between 1977 and 1985, sung directly into a boombox at her family’s home in Addis Ababa, the music captures with nostalgia and foreboding the heartaches and uncertainties prompted by the Ethiopian Red Terror, a period of violent political repression carried out by the Derg regime against its opponents. Odes to her motherland and evocations of the meadows and the sky are offset by overcast clouds, presentiments of exile and memories of her lost childhood as chattering birds and the creaking of her piano bench buttress her pliant yet heartfelt and sometimes dolorous voice, with Emahoy singing in Amharic over the familiar shifts of her piano.
In fact Emahoy produced and released a small run of these Souvenirs back in 2013, sold in the form of a compact disc exclusively via her monastery’s gift shop. Following her funeral in Jerusalem last March, as Cyrus Moussavi of Mississippi Records and the pianist and scholar Thomas Feng pored over hundreds of manuscripts and sixty-four cassette tapes, they discovered scores of liturgical songs and Alvin Lucier-style dubs, plus the original Souvenirs masters. It transpired that the gift shop version of Souvenirs had been digitised about ten percent too fast, so to mark Emahoy’s hundredth year the vocal suite gets a deluxe reissue, with a gold cover, a sixteen-page booklet and lyric translations by Ermias Zemichael, restoring an overlooked chapter of her art in all of its plaintive and sensuous glory.
