Feedel Band performs every month at Bossa Bistro and Lounge in DC's Adams Morgan. (Courtesy photo)
By Aaron Leitko
By the second half of Feedel Band’s gig at Bossa in January, you could tell the group had struck a chord with the audience. It was past 11 p.m. on a cold Thursday night, yet nobody was leaving. Glasses continued to clink and it was a struggle to find an open seat — not exactly a small feat for a work night.
The band, which takes heavy inspiration from the sounds of Ethiopian jazz during the 1960s and ’70s, a style that some of its members had a formative role in developing, managed to summon the feel of a geographically distant time and place, but also a lost moment that hit closer to home. There was something about Feedel Band’s set that made Adams Morgan feel a little more like its old self.
Stylistically speaking, there’s not much out there like Ethiopian jazz. The songs are a moody hybrid of classic R&B grooves and harmonies built atop distinctive minor-key Ethiopian scales. It’s the kind of music that has become rare in the post-Internet everybody-knows-about-everything world — a hybrid born of cultural exchange but nursed and enhanced by isolation. These could be the backing tracks for James Brown in a bizarro reality in which Brown was reserved and moody rather than explosive and effusive.
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