Sometime in the early 1990s, a lavish wedding is thrown at a posh Northern California hotel by a Middle Eastern tycoon who spares no expense to wed a young Ethiopian diaspora couple. There is the usual chaos, disorder and mad rush that attend Ethiopian events, but the hotel staff keeps strict order, and the event progresses ceremoniously.

In the banquet hall, tucked into a small semi-private enclave and attended by a few corteges of admirers are Tilahun Gessesse, Mahmoud Ahmed and Alemayehu Eshete, the legends of modern Ethiopian music. There are other musicians, too, but they garner nary the attention of the guests as do these three, particularly Tilahun Gessesse.

For a collection of a whole tribe of diaspora that left the mother country during the Dergueand settled in America, the music legends represent a little window into a bygone era. An excited father drags two of his reluctant teenage children to the enclave with a tissue paper and a pen in hand seeking an autograph from Tilahun Gessesse. He gets the signature from the legend but fails to impart his enthusiasm to his kids who look embarrassed and detached by the whole drama.

There, too, are the newcomers to the Ethiopian diaspora, those who have arrived during the Dergueregime and following the installment of EPRDF. The newcomers are just as disinterested as the kids about the legendary musicians in their midst. The shining rays of Ethiopian music's Golden Age have bypassed them, and now they live in the glimmering light of their good fortunes for having escaped and survived the crushing jaws of death and tyranny.

Ethiopia’s Golden Age of music emerges in the 1950s when “every imperial institution of note, from the army, the police and the imperial bodyguard to the Haile Selassie Theatre, had its own orchestra, comprising scores of disciplined musicians who enjoyed the tutelage of dedicated foreign bandleaders, such as the Austrian Franz Zelwecker and the Armenian Nerses Nalbandian,” as The Independent newspaper wrote in May 2008.

In the late ’60s and early '70s, Ras, All-Star, Zula, Venus, Wabe Shebele, Roha and Dahlak bands have started to rock the city in hotel banquet halls and night clubs. There are other bands, too. Dashen and the Blue Diamonds, young childhood friends who have learned to play the guitar and trap-sets, croon songs of the Beatles, Aretha Franklin and James Brown.

There are also the Sunday music shows, one of the venues of the young musicians, in an underground tavern next to the National Theater where the young, the hip and the fashionable in-crowd dance and strut with Afro-style hairdos and bell-bottom pants.

At Wabe Shebele Hotel, a permanent band shipped from the Congo is installed, adding African rhythm to the city’s vibrant music scene. Music echoes and ricochets in Addis Abeba from Webe Bereha above Piassa down to the red-light district of Nefas Silk. Eventually, the music contingent spreads even to Dire Dawa when in 1969 the Blue Diamonds travel by train to that exotic city and ignite it in a performance that packs a young audience at the French Club.