When Noise Pop-booked Ethiopian jazz keyboardist Hailu Mergia to play at the Great American Music Hall, they recognized and considered the symmetry: A bold and quick gamble on the high IQ of San Francisco hipster rare-record enthusiasts.
Well, it tracked, for a potential for some dub-jazz-type abracadabra.
Oh, come on now. You see it when strolling down Lower Haight, that sparkle in the eyes of a wax doctor, who only stepped out of the house to pick up one thing at Vinyl Dreams. Five hours later, drunk off the dust in those lower bins at Amoeba, high off the pursuit of that one record that has once again eluded them.
You know what it is, people.
Nothing stands more appealing to a dedicated vinyl junkie than sharing an artist’s story of hardship to captivate other record enthusiasts—and I do mean those same Saturday afternoon Lower Haight Warriors who store their vinyl records in kitchen cupboards and bathroom cabinets. I’ve seen it.
Levels, baby. Levels.
And so the story goes… Awesome Tapes From Africa‘s Brian Shimkovitz found one of Mergia’s cassettes in Africa and tracked him down to DC where he was a cab driver who had yet to play since 1991. The jazz pioneer gets encouraged to release some new material for a young and inquisitive audience that garners over 5 million streams on digital platforms, and the rest makes him a newly discovered entity amongst a certain generation.
That’s the truth and hipster crate-digging lore.
So when the elderly Mergia took the stage on Sunday night, March 3, shuffling his feet, not walking in strides, mini waves of “Oh no” came from some crowd members. Concerned this may just be a polite run-through of previous, old-timey versions of the discography.
Well, I’ll report it: All that shuffling? It was a trap.
Mergia, along with Alemseged Kebede on bass guitar and Kenneth Joseph on drums, punched tempos high, decimated lulls, and rewrote ideas on what Ethiopian jazz is with inspired riffage.
All those years of Mergia driving a cab around Dulles Airport in DC? After dropping off a fare, he’d grab the keyboard from the trunk, sit in the car, and practice. So techniques and ideas remained contemporary.
This was a highly skilled trio, built with rhythmic intensity, that had “making up for lost time” pulsing through song after song. That awareness of career, a combo of lost years and new beginning every night to a stars-in-their-eyes throng of well-wishers: These new veterans kept a young freewheeling, weed-smoking sold-out audience reeling. Forever in great spirits. Appreciating every last second of the 80-minute set.
This is the same venue, where I’ve witnessed Medeski Martin & Wood, Broun Fellinis… Sun Ra Arkestra just blew the doors off a month ago for a three-night sold-out engagement.
All those spirits hanging in GAMH, that ole barn.
But this Elysian trio kept firing off those heat rocks, yes flammables, across the venue like a beach ball caught up in the rapture of patrons at a rowdy Giants game: That varying warbling of the keyboard notes, a touchpoint of numerous jams, setting off runs that did not restrict themselves to just jazz, added to the venue’s history, new spirits to consider in the fold. There was funk, soul, reinterpreted folk musings, and the crowd favorite—the WTF.
I say that kiddingly, but Mergia whips out an accordion at certain times of the night. Then maybe a melodica. Slotted in the proper improvisation windows provided, this upper septuagenarian still gave the impression of wanting to explore atmospheres, not pull back from them.
Alternating between the synth and a Fender Rhodes, his melodies, those slippery note musings rode perfectly atop the full-throttle funk his bass and drum player were dealing out to the crowd, and heavens all night.
“That show was burnin'” was a response I got from a local publicist who books acts within that frequency. Yes, Noise Pop, this one, I didn’t see it coming. Way to expand the vibration in your curation. Kudos.
