When most folks think of Ethiopian music they hear the slithering soul-funk sounds created by artists like Mahmoud Ahmed or Tilahun Gessesse—killer singers who delivered Amharic-language jams with ...

You’d expect a conversation with Mulatu Astatke to be about music. He is, after all, the father of a musical genre: Ethio-jazz. But when he talks about the art form, he tends to focus on its ...