Recommended If You Like....Music

The startling serenity of Ethiopian pianist and composer Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru

Today’s survey question: When searching the interwebs for unfamiliar music, how likely are you to follow those “Recommended If You Like” suggestions that are appended to reviews and record store descriptions?

For the last month, I’ve pretty much been saying Yes To All, in hopes of an encounter with freaky and sublime sounds that I wouldn’t have found any other way. Example: I dipped into a few minutes of Live At the Gong Family Unconventional Gathering – a superlative 2005 live recording of a reunion show involving musicians from the many different iterations of this (deeply inventive, still underestimated) prog-rock band.

At the bottom of the Gong release Bandcamp page were links to RIYL albums – including a gleefully unhinged 1979 set from British guitarist Steve Hillage entitled The Glastonbury Experience. Both are highly recommended….if, that is, you like music.

Many of the name-drop associations brandished on Bandcamp and elsewhere seem opportunistic: We’ve got lots of singer-songwriters who don’t necessarily have much in common with Nick Drake but are recommended to Nick Drake fans all the same. Another overused touchstone: The composer Erik Satie. His fragile miniature pieces for piano pretty much exist in their own ecosystem. But that doesn’t stop Internet marketing types from name-checking Satie as closely related to (or an influence on) works by ambient electronic artists, jazz artists and (yes) singer-songwriters.

After hearing parts of maybe six or seven slow, numbingly predictable records that were recommended for Satie lovers, my patience was exhausted. None got anywhere near the muted-yet-still-vivid colors of Satie, his quiet mastery of interior-voice tension.

That’s when I stumbled onto a Bandcamp page about the unusual work of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, a pianist and composer who recorded two volumes of her pensive, arpeggio-rich compositions in the 1960s. Born into a wealthy family in Addis Ababa in 1923, Emahoy studied classical music in Europe and traveled widely before having a spiritual awakening in the late 1940s. She became a nun, and later returned to the piano as a fundraising tool: These private press records, recorded in Germany, were sold at benefit performances to support orphanages, victims of war and violence, and other philanthropic causes.

They still are. Emahoy continues to perform – she’s 98 and living in Jerusalem. (Among other causes, her foundation supports music education in the U.S. and around the world.) In recent years her two titles have been issued by a string of labels – the veteran reissue imprint Light in the Attic sold them for a while, and in May the small Mississippi Records brought out new vinyl and digital editions with translated liner notes by the artist.

By turns whimsical and earnest, Emahoy’s compositions juxtapose elements of Satie (the calm deliberation, the cyclical harmony) against other musical ideas that took hold in the early part of the 20th century, before World War I. Emahoy’s dramatic melodies scamper up and down the keyboard with a joy and abandon recalling ragtime and speakeasies; these sometimes even include flatted-third “blue” notes. Other pieces explore the solemn responsorial incantations of church services, or the lush chordal flourishes of Debussy and the impressionists.

Sometimes the pieces wander listlessly or become overly repetitive, but even then Emahoy emphasizes a feeling, which she shares with Satie, of pensive calm. It’s as though she’s using these curious little phrases as a healer would — to clear away distractions and create space for listeners to experience her sense of tranquility, her spirit. It's easy to dismiss her work as “outsider art,” as it does operate apart from some common musical conventions. But it’s also outsider in another sense: Songs like “The Last Tears of the Deceased” (written for her late brother) and “Song of the Sea,” exert this transfixing almost paramusical pull, drawing the listener outside of the mundane mental chatter of the moment and into a realm of what sounds like peace.