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The piano style of Emahoy Tsegu\u00e9-Maryam Gu\u00e8brou – 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 \u00c9thiopiques<\/em> 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 \u00c9thiopiques<\/em> volume has seen her dubbed ‘the honky-tonk nun’ and lauded as one of the most distinctive pianists in all of contemporary classical music.<\/p>\n