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.
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