The World Music CD Listener’s Guide: Aster Aweke and the Golden Age of Ethiopian Music
by Daniel Finn
I started a vinyl marketplace to discover and share music with others. I found an old world music guide at a thrift store, so now we use it to discover music one artist at a time.
Follow along as I work through it. I’ve also built a playlist for anyone who wants to listen to these artists. Obviously only good music makes the cut.
We’re moving into Aster Aweke.
Aster Aweke began her career in Ethiopia during the 1970s, becoming one of the most recognisable voices in Ethiopian music. She started performing as a teenager in Addis Ababa before building a reputation through the city’s vibrant music scene. In the early 1980s, she moved to the United States, where she became one of the artists helping introduce Ethiopian music to a wider international audience.
Her sound sits within Ethiopian popular music, drawing heavily from traditional Ethiopian melodies, Amharic poetry, and the country’s unique musical scales. Her voice became the defining part of her sound, moving between emotional ballads and more rhythmic arrangements influenced by the golden era of Ethiopian music.
Aster’s career is closely connected to the Ethiopian music revival that brought attention back to artists from the 1960s and 1970s. Collections like the Éthiopiques series helped introduce many of these sounds to new audiences around the world, and her recordings became an important part of that wider discovery.
One thing I found really interesting was discovering how much her music influenced The Weeknd. Growing up in Toronto, Abel Tesfaye said his family played Ethiopian artists including Aster Aweke and Mulatu Astatke at home. He later sampled Aster’s song “Y’shebellu” on his track “False Alarm” from Starboy, bringing a piece of Ethiopian music history into a completely different generation of listeners.
For me, Aster Aweke is a perfect example of why I wanted to start this series. You find an artist from a completely different place and time, then realise their influence is still hiding inside some of the biggest music happening today.