Hailu Mergia Performs in Brooklyn

Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

Though he was a star in Ethiopia, Hailu Mergia has driven a taxi in Washington for two decades. On Thursday in Brooklyn, he played his first American show since 1991.

By JON PARELES

There’s a back story behind the African funk that had the whole room dancing on Thursday night at Baby’s All Right, the new club in Williamsburg. Hailu Mergia, the keyboardist leading the band, was playing his first American show since 1991. For the last two decades, he has been driving an airport taxicab in Washington.

Mr. Mergia was a star of Ethiopian music in the 1970s as a member of the Walias Band, which had worked its way to the top of the Addis Ababa club circuit. In 1981, when Ethiopia was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship, the Walias Band came to perform in the United States, and Mr. Mergia and some of the other band members stayed, settling among the many Ethiopian immigrants in Washington.

For a few years, Mr. Mergia led the Zula Band there; after it dissolved, Mr. Mergia studied music at Howard University and decided to start playing the accordion, an instrument that had been used in Ethiopian music of an earlier generation.

In 1985, he went into a small studio to record for himself. With the accordion and the studio’s synthesizer, electric piano and drum machine, he overdubbed himself to make what would become an album of instrumentals, “Hailu Mergia and His Classical Instrument.” The classical instrument was the accordion, but its old-fashioned tone was joined by the new electronic sounds. With the unswerving patterns from the drum machine, the music came across as an eerie, isolated rumination on a place and time Mr. Mergia had left behind, with its Ethiopian modes and melodies transplanted to a modern terra incognita.

Back in Ethiopia, the album became a hit. But in Washington, Mr. Mergia’s musical career gave way to cab driving.

Recently Brian Shimkovitz, who runs the blog and label with the self-explanatory name Awesome Tapes From Africa, came across “His Classical Instrument” in a cassette shop in Ethiopia. He tracked down Mr. Mergia and reissued it. The renewed interest in Mr. Mergia led to a European tour, and now the Brooklyn show.

At Baby’s All Right, Mr. Mergia was backed by seven American musicians who look toward African music, including the guitarist Nikhil P. Yerawadekar, who leads the band Low Mentality. The live guitars, horns and rhythm sections made an earthier showcase for Mr. Mergia’s keyboards; he played mostly organ and electric piano, using accordion only for one tune, “Shemonmuanaye” from “His Classical Instrument.” Much of the set looked even further back, to the Walias Band. The band’s funk was crisp and disciplined, informed by American soul but also at home with the rolling six-beat vamps of Ethiopian funk.

And Mr. Mergia, who never stopped playing music at home, was seizing his new public moment. His solos went snaking up and down the distinctive melodic modes of Ethiopian music: minor scales with non-Western chromatic turns and dissonant zigzags that often come across as both mournful and adamant. On electric piano, he gave them a jazzy sparkle; on organ, they were more pushy, scurrying and circling through the modal scales before climbing up to insistently jabbing notes and chords.

The audience wouldn’t let Mr. Mergia go; the band came back for what seemed to be an unplanned encore. Partway through it, Baby’s All Right had the kind of moment new clubs have: The stage power cut out, regular lights were replaced by dim emergency ones and an alarm briefly sounded. The horns and percussion kept playing, the audience kept clapping its hands and dancing, and the chirps of the alarm fit perfectly into the groove.