Mahmoud Ahmed

Ethiopia uses the term eskeusta to denote a form of ecstasy expressed through tremors that start in the shoulders, travel along the spine, and reach the legs and feet. No other male vocalist to emerge from the country matches Mahmoud Ahmed in generating this effect.

Across more than four decades Ahmed has interwoven Ethiopia’s traditional Amharic music—built on a five-note scale, jazz-inflected singing, and elaborate circular rhythms carrying an Indian character—with pop and jazz, producing sounds as daring, intense, startling, and hallucinatory as the most immersive dub or the furthest reaches of free jazz. Ahmed’s multi-octave voice must be experienced directly, much like the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, because words alone cannot convey it.

He has enjoyed national stardom in Ethiopia since his earliest recordings. His soaring vocals, set against the unbound jazz approach of the Ibex Band on the classic album Ere Mela Mela, diverge sharply from standard Afro-pop. The rhythms remain cyclical and forceful, recalling Fela yet without the same hardness. Ahmed’s voice—high notes that seem to pursue one another, allied with precise tone and phrasing—remains the decisive factor. By performing in this manner he links older and newer Ethiopian music, recognizing shared traits that have persisted and choosing to unite them rather than treating historic styles as the preserve of specialists.

Western coverage of Afro-pop concentrated on sub-Saharan artists, so Ethiopian performers such as Ahmed, Hirut Bekele, Ali Birra, and Alemayehu Eshete received comparatively little attention. Later figures including Aster Aweke, who moved to the United States in the mid-’80s, and Netsanet Mellesse drew greater notice, creating pathways toward the artists who shaped them. Ahmed’s work has been featured repeatedly in the Ethiopiques series of reissues from Buda Musique, with four volumes—6, 7 (his landmark Erè Mèla Mèla), 19, and 26—devoted entirely to his recordings and additional singles appearing across others. Ethiopiques, Vol. 26 collects the tracks he made fronting Ethiopia’s Imperial Bodyguard Band from 1972 to 1974, presented chronologically, although he was no longer a member of the group at the time.