Boston's Ethiopian groove master delves into electronic soundscapes

In the 2008 Ethiopian film “Teza,” the protagonist returns from Germany a broken man after his medical career is cut short by a hate crime. At the conclusion of the Haile Gerima-directed movie, an elder comforts the man by saying “We are children of the dragon.”

That line inspired the naming of dragonchild, the current project of a Jamaica Plain-based saxophonist and composer who fuses expansive electronic soundscapes with the tones, melodies and rhythms of Ethiopia. Although dragonchild’s debut album just came out last year, the musician behind the project will be familiar to many Boston music fans: D.A. Mekonnen, who led the long-running sprawling Ethiopian funk outfit Debo Band. The album will be celebrated with a local release concert on Saturday, April 13, as part of the opening of the Peabody Essex Museum’s exhibit “Ethiopia at the Crossroads.”

Debo played its last show in 2019 before going on an indefinite hiatus. Looking for a way to escape the logistical nightmares and creative compromises that come with leading a large ensemble, Mekonnen had already started recording the pieces that comprise the “dragonchild” LP. Committed to a life of sobriety, meditation, herbalism and the spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, Mekonnen wanted a new musical challenge. While Debo was inspired by the Ethiopian big bands of the 1960s and ‘70s, “I was starting to imagine a type of project more in line with the way that Ethiopian musicians made music in the ‘80s, when they branched out on their own and did solo records that used the technology of the studio and a strong solo voice,” he says.

Mekonnen also reached back to his own ancestors for inspiration. He was born in Sudan after his parents, active members of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party, had to leave Ethiopia. “I come into the world as an inheritor of revolution,” he says, “so when I think about my art and work it’s always in that context.”

Mekonnen’s grandparents practiced Zār, a healing ritual with Ethiopian roots found in Africa and the Middle East. “Studying herbalism, I learned about traditions where you think of plants as your ancestors. It’s a way of going back to a time before borders,” he says. “There’s a lot of spellcasting and magic in this project.”

For “dragonchild,” Mekonnen sent music he had recorded to a number of collaborators. Some, like sound producers Christopher Cook and claire rousay, made the droning, ambient tracks “Incantation” and “Meditation.” Others took a different approach. “Vincent Ama took some unaccompanied saxophone duets I had played and chopped them up into an Afrobeats thing called ‘Long Tall Dexter,’ which was inspired by Dexter Gordon,” Mekonnen says. “The producer Ethiopian Records sent me a really fun house track he had produced and to this day I have no idea which sax part of mine he was playing.”

It was a very different process from Debo Band, where Mekonnen says he played the role of bandleader, musician, scholar and arranger. Now his focus is on the saxophone. “I tend to talk to my collaborators a lot and tell them the spirit of the project,” he says, “and once we do that, the ball is in their court and they pretty much have free reign.”

Mekonnen also created an eight-channel mix of his composition “Meditation” called “Black,” which was released as a single that comes on four vinyl records that are intended to be played at the same time. “One of the most enjoyable and instructive ways that I remember listening to music was getting together with my friends. Someone would bring a CD that no one else has,” Mekonnen says. “Streaming has taken that way, so I thought this would be a fun way to encourage community listening.” And if you don’t happen to have four friends who can bring a turntable, there’s a website called dragonchild.black that suggests ways to position streaming devices in a room so the full surround sound mix can be heard.

Another “dragonchild” collaborator was Ravish Momin, an Indian American drummer and electronic composer who performs as Sunken Cages. After a one-off duet in Texas, dragonchild x Sunken Cages have started touring internationally, despite just having one released track to date. (A second will be on the next Sunken Cages project, and there are plans for more music by the two in the future.) Just in the last month, the two have appeared together at Joe’s Pub in New York City, the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

“It was a good fit to find someone with his openness,” says Momin. “A lot of musicians are closed off to electronics. And he’s a great player with jazz sensibilities who is tuned into non-Western rhythms.”

At Big Ears in March, the two performed in front of a series of visual displays that were just as impactful as the music. Archival images of Ethiopian musicians and newly created films of Indian dancers added context to the multi-layered live and digital rhythms and incendiary saxophone playing.

“If we’re going to play non-commercial music that is not vocal-based, and if we want to play for an audience that might not be steeped in experimental music, having visuals and other entry points are important,” says Momin, who says such a presentation is in service of the duo’s mission to “decolonize global music. We’re finding influences from different cultures and making them our own.”

At his solo PEM concert, Mekonnen will take a similar approach, screening unique visuals for each song, including the work of photographer Michael Tsegaye that Mekonnen says helped inspire the music and concept.

“The idea of dragonchild is to encourage us to remember our connection to the planet as one human family,” he says. “And hopefully, with some revolutionary love and resistance, we can create a better world.”