(On the tomb of) Ephrem Tamiru's 'Track 6'
Ethio-Jazz, Tilaye Gebre and Transition Vamps
Before I start, I just want to make one thing clear: superstar Ethiopian singer/songwriter Ephrem Tamiru (whose surname is sometimes spelt Tamru) is not dead yet—as far as I can tell, anyway.
The title of this post is actually a reference to a poem that will shortly appear in my third full-length poetry collection, Transition Vamps, which is based on the premise that Ephrem Tamiru performed a song I’ve always referred to simply as ‘Track 6’.
I wrote ‘(On the tomb of) Ephrem Tamiru’ in March 2012, during a phase when I was composing one poem per week and sending them directly, without revision, to the 50 people who had signed up to my oh-so originally named ‘Poem of the Week’ newsletter. I sent it out via the TinyLetter service (which formed the basis for my MailChimp mailing list, which then became this Substack newsletter). I later compiled the 22 poems as a chapbook, Tjugotvå.
The poem itself takes on a hypnogogic, feverish tone, and is written in jagged lines, every second one indented. It makes a series of logical leaps, none of which are strictly accurate: for example, it namechecks Australian author Thomas Keneally, whose 1989 novel Towards Asmara, about the independence movement in Eritrea (a country once annexed by Ethiopia but independent since 1993), had nothing to do with Ephrem Tamiru, or jazz.
Ephrem Tamiru! tell us what you think re:
Anchin Kalmeselesh or else just the sax
(slow and shark-like snarling through
an Asmara bar to hit Thomas Keneally
cold in the nose like a sweet tea might
were it to care for snark or saxophoneElsewhere, it compares Ephrem Tamiru to Stevie Wonder, which is less controversial.
Ephrem’s sound worlds unfurling slow
as Stevie Wonder’s imagination (you
were Ethiopia’s Stevie, always will be
mine what does it mean Atawquatim
the drums tell me what it all means‘(On the tomb of) Ephrem Tamiru’ also references, albeit obliquely, the manner in which I first came to be aware of Ephrem’s music.
i feel kind of bad for the Blogger-files
downloading yr trax frantically to play
to get the info (titles translations set-listsAt the time, I was living in Stockholm, and going through an Ethio-Jazz phase (who wasn’t?), listening to works by Mulatu Astatke, Tilahun Gessesse and Mahmoud Ahmed as compiled on albums such as Éthiopiques Vol 4: Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale 1969-1974. Mulatu had hit the mainstream, and his version of ‘Tezeta’ was later sampled by Fleet Foxes, thus cementing his indie cred.
But I don’t recall exactly how Ephrem Tamiru came into the picture, although it was probably serendipitous. I’d arrived in Stockholm at the bleak nadir of an extremely harsh winter, and spent my first month there in a rented apartment in Solna, close by the research institute where I worked. It was deathly cold, and I only left the flat to work and to visit the underground shopping centre.
This left me with plenty of spare time to listen to artists like Mulatu Astatke, for example on Spotify (which back then presented itself as a more ethical service than it has since turned out to be), or else on random music blogs, and then go down the rabbit holes of similar, name-checked artists. Anyway, I guess that’s how Ephrem came into my life: by chance.
However, information about the artist known to Amharic speakers the world over as Ephrem Tamiru is notoriously hard to find. This is partly due to the relative lack of knowledge outside Ethiopia about the country’s deep musical and cultural traditions, as well as the language barrier (Amharic, a semitic script, has never been systematically Romanized) and Western fetishisation (which breeds ignorance).
But from what I can garner online, Ephrem Tamiru was born around 1960 in Gojjam (a ‘zone’ now known as Mirab Gojjam), in the Amhara region of western Ethiopia, near the source of the Blue Nile, and the border with Sudan. Ephrem first came to prominence in Ethiopia in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and has since gone on to release many albums, bootlegs of which can be found in all the usual places.
My first taste of the epic sound empires of Ephrem Tamiru came through his straight-to-cassette album, The Famous Ephrem Tamiru, which was probably released in 1982, although one can’t be sure, given the discrepancies between the Ethiopian and Gregorian calendars. Whatever its progeny, the album remained largely unknown outside the Ethiopian diaspora until it was uploaded to the Awesome Tapes from Africa website in 2011.
Put simply, The Famous Ephrem Tamiru is a classic.
The site’s owner described the release as follows:
What a beautiful tape from Ethiopia, which is having a morphine-like effect on my body. It’s that soothing. I am gonna go take a nap now. I don’t have anything to say, just listen to this and feel good today. Talk to you later. Love, Brian.
—Brian Shimkovitz, Awesome Tapes from Africa (2011)
Take a listen to the first song from the album, ‘ፍቅር እንደገና’ [Love Again], and judge for yourself.
I’ll wait.
Despite the fact that neither Brian Shimkovitz or Awesome Tapes from Africa owned the rights to Ephrem Tamiru’s music (let alone any of the other tapes uploaded to the ATFA website: see this lengthy explanation for the full, chaotic mea culpa), I downloaded the entire thing immediately, without once questioning the ethics of doing so, and began listening to the whole album on repeat, but especially the enigmatic ‘Track 6’—an instrumental that ran to just 2:50, and featured a spellbinding and sorrowful saxophone solo.
can't go back now to my indie daze
got me Ephrem in the mound of love
in the mouth a super-Saharan man
pre-beat jazz combo smoking suits
preserved in shellac Youtube amberMeanwhile, people started leaving comments on The Famous Ephrem Tamiru, some requesting translations of the song titles, or further information about the artist; others wondered about broken links to individual mp3s. In particular, people wanted to know what had happened to the mp3 version of ‘Track 6’:
That instrumental on track 6 is a total jam.
Fantastic tape! But where did track no. 6 go?
can you perhaps fix the link to track6?
The link for Track 6 is broken.
Hi there, would it be possible to fix track 6. Great music by the way, thanks!
—Various commenters, Awesome Tapes from Africa (2011-19)
Indeed, the link to ‘Track 6’ suddenly redirected to the Awesome Tapes from Africa landing page. It was almost as if someone (maybe even Ephrem himself) contacted Brian at Awesome Tapes from Africa and asked him to remove it, for some reason. Or else the song, which sounded pretty similar to the other tracks on the album, might not actually have been performed by Ephrem Tamiru in the first place.
I decided to live with the ambiguity of that, as well as my own complicity in the unauthorised appropriation of Ephrem’s sound clouds. It suited me to do so, as I had no real way of righting the wrong, other than offering an exculpatory mea culpa on my own website which nobody else would read. That was until my poetry collection Transition Vamps began to look like a reality, and I began the process of writing acknowledgements for the poems in the book.
How might I acknowledge Ephrem Tamiru?
Quite by accident, after intermittently searching for biographical information about him online for a mere fifteen years, I then discovered, on YouTube of course, that ‘Track 6’ is actually an instrumental version of ‘Ānichī Keto Gidi Yeleshimi’ (አንቺ ከቶ ግድ የለሽም)—a song made famous by Tilahun Gessesse. A song whose title can be translated from Amharic as ‘You don’t care at all’.
But that wasn’t all. The instrumental version of ‘Ānichī Keto Gidi Yeleshimi’ I downloaded in 2011, thinking it was by Ephrem Tamiru, also turned up on Spotify, on a dubiously titled album, Ethiopiam Airlines Instrumenal Volume 2. There are no credits to accompany the album, and no information about who released it. Identically bogus versions are also available on Apple Music, YouTube and Amazon, suggesting it’s a pirated compilation.
However, last week, I tried searching one more time—just for this old timer’s sake, as it were—and finally, exhilaratingly, identified the original performers of the song: Tilaye Gebre and the Dahlak Band. Incredibly, a record label called Muzikawi, based in Addis Ababa and Stockholm, re-released an album’s worth of Gebre’s stone-cold classic saxophone tracks in February 2026, including ‘Ānichī Keto Gidi Yeleshimi’!
Not only that but it’s a full, uncut version of ‘Ānichī Keto Gidi Yeleshimi’: five minutes and fifty-one glorious seconds of sax-induced sadness, in much higher quality than the mp3 version on the Awesome Tapes from Africa website. I don’t know anything about restoring old cassette recordings of songs from the peak era of Ethio-Jazz, but it seems like the people at Muzikawi sure do.
According to the label’s social media post announcing the re-release, Tilaye’s Saxophone with the Dahlak Band was “recorded as a one-take live cassette at the legendary Ghion Hotel [in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa] in the late 1970s—one microphone at the front, hit record: no EQ, no reverb, just some delay—which became the signature recipe for the Dahlak Band’s characteristic Ethiopian rare groove sound”.
One take? One microphone?
Further, according to the Muzikawi website, Tilaye Gebre has been a central figure in the Ethio-jazz world for quite some time:
In the quiet storm of Ethiopian music in the mid- to late-1970s, Tilaye Gebre was something of the eye at the center. Even though much of the music from that period has been ridiculously hard to excavate from history, chances are that if you pick up any gem recorded in Addis Ababa during those times, it features Tilaye on saxophone and his arrangements.
Muzikawi goes on to describe Tilaye’s Saxophone with the Dahlak Band as “an album typical of a rare groove on the Ethiopian scene — with excursions into reggae territory”.
The band’s rendition of ‘Ānichī Keto Gidi Yeleshimi’ is indeed heavy on dub, but it’s Gebre’s saxophone that ultimately slays. It’s incredible to think that this song—and the entire album—was recorded in one take, using a single microphone.
In my 2012 poem about Ephrem Tamiru, written to the tune of a track that I now know was not even recorded by Ephrem in the first place, I wrote:
I want to die in the arms of my lover
while she plays the sax on ‘Track Six’
whatever it’s called)‘Ānichī Keto Gidi Yeleshimi’, then, provides an uncomfortable answer to that question, namely: ‘You don’t care at all’.
But to prove that I do really care (a lot), I ordered a copy of Tilaye’s Saxophone with the Dahlak Band from Muzikawi on double 12” vinyl, encased in a colour, gatefold sleeve, and to hell with the customs duties and shipping costs. It arrived here in Fryslan this week. Now I just need to negotiate with my daughter for access to her portable record player.
I don’t quite dare to write to Brian at ATFA to ask him how a track like ‘Ānichī Keto Gidi Yeleshimi’ accidentally ended up on an album by Ephrem Tamiru in the first place. But I’ve emailed Muzikawi asking for an interview with Tilaye Gebre, or else someone from Muzikawi, mostly so that I can pose one burning question: did Tilaye, by any chance, ever grace an Ephrem Tamiru track with his unforgettable sax sound?
I’ll let you know how it goes.
In the meantime, just listen to ‘Ānichī Keto Gidi Yeleshimi’ a couple of dozen times and then tell me, with not a single tear in your eye, that you don’t care at all.
Unfortunately, it’s too late to add an explanatory note about the version of ‘(On the tomb of) Ephrem Tamiru’ as it appears in my forthcoming poetry collection, Transition Vamps, although it now feels increasingly appropriate that the book’s cover is set to feature a cut-up blue saxophone.
And while I originally thought that blue saxophone might have once belonged to Ephrem Tamiru, or else one of his smoking-jacket-wearing bandmates, knowing that it’s more likely to be a simulacrum of Tilaye’s tenor sax means I can eventually rest in peace in the arms of my lover—as physically improbable as that sounds—while she plays the melody from ‘Track 6’ on that sax of her’s she keeps in the cupboard, the one she’s never played for me before, which might as well be in Asmara. •
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Davey
