Growing up in Ethiopia, the musical path was not one the young Mulatu Astatke was expected to go down. Instead, in the 1950s he went to high school at Lindisfarne College in north Wales to study aeronautical engineering. While there he had the chance to pick up musical instruments, and discovered he had a natural talent. He soon moved to pursue his interest in music at Trinity College of Music in London, where he studied clarinet, piano and percussion and recorded with Guyanan singer Frank Holder. “I went to Trinity College in London and studied classical music, and that is where I found myself. They found I had the talent. My musical experience started here.” He then moved to the United States to study music at Berklee, Boston, where he was the first African student. Here he learned about arranging and composing, worked with big bands and took up the vibraphone. “And of course there was jazz,” he adds. “At Berklee I had a very interesting teacher who said, ‘Be yourself’. So I went to Berklee and became myself, by creating the music, Ethio jazz.”