music

it has been a bank holiday weekend here in england. one of those bank holidays i shall never understand the purpose of, but if am never one to object to....a day out of the office?
normal people would have written " a day off work" but actually i did go into work today, on the holiday, but it was my fun job, at the bookshop, and i only did a 4 hour shift, for which i will receive double pay, so no complaints there!
in the evenings, after all the counting up had been done in the back office of the shop, i went home to work on my very neglected thesis. it is sometimes hard to remember that i came to this country to do a phd. sometimes it seems that since i have been here, i have done everything except that. i often regret having ever started it, but i do want to finish, i have wasted to much time on it not to.
so i got home, changed into my domashnaia odezhda and tried to edit. but i realised something was missing! my Ethiopian music!
i have always had eclectic taste, but there are very few things i can productively work to. i cannot work at all though, without music or distraction of some sort. so for the past few months, i have turned on my Ethiopian tunes before even bothering to open word.
All the albums i have were made during the supposed golden age of ethiopian sound, a remarkably brief period between 1969 and 1975. but the stuff produced in those 6 short years was enough to fill albums of incredible variety. the influence of western jazz is strong, as are Armenian rhythms, apparently the result of the Arba Lijoch, a group of 40 Armenian orphans who escaped from the Armenian genocide in Turkey, and were then, randomly, adopted by Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. For some reason, the emperor concluded Armenians were unusually musical and paid for their ongoing musical training. Selassie didnt much like the decadent sounds that came out of his country in his last years, and tried to stop the musicians from performing live concerts. but that was nothing compared to the Derg, which executed and imprisoned tens of thousands of its opponents without trial, hitting the musical community hard. Those who were left were forced underground or into exile. one has to wonder what would have happened had the political situation gone another way?