Featuring Santa Cruz violinist Kaethe Hostetter, Qwanqua brings its Ethiopian jazz-influenced sound to shows in Santa Cruz and Berkeley.
Looking back at the path that took her from Santa Cruz to Boston to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, violinist Kaethe Hostetter sees opportunities seized and creative gambits that hit pay dirt. She’s also clear that the creation of Qwanqwa, the singular quintet featuring four of Ethiopia’s most acclaimed and experimental-minded traditional musicians, wasn’t the result of a carefully laid plan.
Rather than taking out student loans to go to music school, kept herself unfettered by debt so that she could follow her muse wherever it led. Plunging into Boston’s creatively roiling acoustic music scene, she ended up helping found Debo Band in the late aughts. “I wanted to follow my instrument and let my musical journey go wherever it would take me,” Hostetter said. “When Debo went to Ethiopia it wasn’t that I was leaving the band behind. I could stay and be the representative in Addis. I came back and performed a lot and would always bring new music, injecting what I was hearing straight from Addis.”
“I was mostly trying to collaborate with every traditional musician I could find,” Hostetter said. “I was searching for experimental minds and fluency in tradition, which can be seen as opposites. But I was giving it time while I was learning the language, which really helped get deeper into the music because like Amharic the melodies are so syncopated, so that helped unlock the rhythms.”
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