It’s been a while since I’ve fallen head-over-heels in love with a genre I had never even heard of before (and it’s one of my very favorite experiences), but over the past few months I have utterly lost my heart to Ethiopian music from the 60s and 70s, sometimes called Ethio Jazz. There’s a fantastic series of albums, “Éthiopiques”, which documents the scene. It’s kind of like jazz, kind of like soul music, sometimes kind of like funk, and always steeped in the hypnotic cycles of traditional Northern African music, but it throws those all in a blender and something utterly unique comes out. The “very-best-of” compilation I would have liked to link isn’t available online, but here’s some random person’s playlist which includes some good representational material: