Bole2Harlem: Little Africa's biggest sound

Since Mahmoud Ahmed, who won this year's Radio 3 Award for World Music in the Africa category, had his first Western record release in 1986, Ethiopian music from the Sixties and Seventies – the "golden years" – has seeped into the groundwater of Western taste, converting the likes of Brian Eno, Robert Plant and Elvis Costello to the joys of the Ethiopiques album series, now at more than 20 volumes.

A two-CD Ethiopiques selection has been released by Union Square, but there's a fresh and radically different sound coming from the Ethiopian diaspora in the Little Africa of Harlem, New York, where a scene that coalesced around a Moroccan-French restaurant called L'Orange Bleue has turned into an ambitious and independent recording project.

At L'Orange Bleue on most Saturday nights, a loose group of musicians and DJs combined to stoke up an after-hours after-party that combined American East Coast hip-hop with all manner of rhythms from Harlem's African diaspora – Ethiopian, Malian, Moroccan. At the centre of it all was the Chicago-born producer and percussionist David Schommer – an original cast member of the long-running show Stomp – who kept a set of drums at the restaurant. "The owner had this great world- music collection, and we'd go there to beat drums and make merry all night long," he says.

It was from those sessions that he and a group of fellow-musicians relocated a few blocks away to his home studio on 123rd Street, to create the hybrid of Ethiopian soul and East Coast hip-hop that is the gloriously upbeat Bole2Harlem.

"I've always tried to surround myself with great musicians," enthuses Schommer, "because that's how you raise your game."

Bole – pronounced Bo-lay – is Ethiopia's main airport in Addis Ababa, and the slang term for the city's legion of taxis, whose drivers seem to be the key arbiters of musical taste. "It's a thing they call a remix: they change the rhymes, turn the sound down and sing their own verses over it. It's what they do for fun, I guess." And, presumably, in the hope of a good tip at the end of the journey.

The journey's end for Schommer and the Bole2Harlem crew is a joyous, upbeat, multi-layered, and frankly irresistible album that seamlessly blends the street sounds of Ethiopia with New York's uptown Little Africa, combining as it does Harlem rap, Ethiopian rhythms, Malian kora, and sassy horns that are as reminiscent of James Brown's crew as of the great Ethiopiques bands of the Sixties and Seventies.

"It hasn't been gentrified as much as elsewhere," says Schommer of Harlem, who relocated here from high-rent Tribeca a few years ago. "It's a very cool place. I know all my neighbours and they span all the economic and cultural skylines. And you've got a tap to Africa – all the latest releases come out here. When I walk out my door, I hear reggae, hip-hop, call to prayer, Youssou N'Dour, Malian music, and gospel, in the space of two blocks!"

Bole2Harlem was driven by the basic desire to get different musicians from different cultures together, and see what happened next. "It grew over an eight-month period, with all these people's energies mixed into it," says Schommer. "If there's a political side to the record, it's the idea of intermarriage. Here, we've got all these cultures living together. It's like a model of what it could be like everywhere. It has a positive message."

From the start, there was one voice that Schommer knew he had to have on the record, that of Tigist Shibabaw – whose sister Gigi is married to the producer Bill Laswell, and has worked with Herbie Hancock and Pharoah Saunders. She has one of those unique voices that lifts everything around it. Schommer first heard her in a studio session with her sister, and spent months tracking her down to appear on Bole2Harlem.

Her vocals alone make the trip worthwhile – just check out the infectious "Aya Bellew". "It was the last song we recorded," recalls Schommer. "And that's the track where Tigist really gave what I'd been looking for."

They were joined by the rapper Maki Siraj, a longtime friend of Schommer. The album's writing team was centred around this core trio. "He'd rhyme, I'd create this musical bed, and Tigist would bring her crazy melodic sense in there."

Building up the tracks layer by layer, Schommer found it easier than expected to get others on board, simply by playing them a taster. "I'd tell them about this Ethiopian crossover record and play them a bit of it," he says, "and they'd go, 'man you've gotta let us play on this!'." That's how the horn player Robert Aaron, the Malian kora player Balla Tounkora, Joewarn Martin's gospel organ and Dave Eggers' cello entered the mix.

It's a rich, vibrant brew, the music thick with percussive layers that career from one side of the street to the other – from Ethiopian pentatonic scales to Harlem old-school hip-hop beats. With Tigist's striking vocals, Maki's muscular Amharic rap, the dense layers of horns, gospel keyboards, and the nimble bass lines of the crack Ethiopian session player Henok Temesgen, it's a true musical crossover, with Schommer playing the ferryman.

Since its US release, the record has found its way back to Ethiopia, but what kind of impact has it had on the streets, and in the cabs of Addis? "Maki was given a real compliment when he was last there," says Schommer, smiling. He'd given the driver a tape of "Quralew", one of the album's closing songs. "It's a vendor's song, everyone's heard it. Maki knew it from his childhood. The driver puts the tape on, then turns around and says, 'I can't remix this. You're speaking our language!'."

It sounds as if the fare from Bole to Harlem has been paid in full.

'Bole2Harlem Vol 1' is out on World Connection; 'The Very Best of Ethiopiques' is out on Union Square