Minyeshu

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous. Find sources: "Minyeshu" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message) You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Dutch. (July 2021) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Dutch article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Dutch Wikipedia article at [[:nl:Minyeshu]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|nl|Minyeshu}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation. The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for music. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources: "Minyeshu" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Minyeshu Minyeshu Kifle Tedla
Minyeshu performing at a Liberationfestival in The Hague, 2012
Background information
Origin	Dire Dawa, Ethiopia
Genres	Ethiopian music world
Occupation(s)	Singer, dancer
Instrument	Vocals
Website	http://www.minyeshu.nl

Minyeshu Kifle Tedla (Amharic: ምንይሹ ክፍሌ ተድላ) is an Ethiopian singer and dancer. She lives in Eindhoven in the Netherlands. She is a member of the band Chewata.

Born in the Eastern Ethiopian city of Dire Dawa to Amhara parents, Minyeshu moved to the capital Addis Ababa at the age of 9. She visited a live concert for the first time with a friend when she was 14. Right after, she auditioned and was hired as a singer in a band. At age 16 She was accepted as a dancer in the Ethiopian National Theatre. Her parents disapproved her ambitions to become an artist, and she soon began living with her aunt instead.

As part of the National Theatre, she toured abroad.^[1] With the arrival of the new EPRDF government in 1991, the board of the National Theatre was fired and for political reasons censorship was imposed on certain performances. Minyeshu described her experience in an interview ‘‘the board was replaced by people who didn't know what they were doing; a terrible situation where we as artists were degraded to puppets of the regime’’^[2][1]

In addition to dancing, Minyeshu also kept singing, with the band Ambassel in particular. In 1996 she traveled with this band to Europe for a few shows. Due to safety concerns back in Ethiopia, she decided to claim asylum in Belgium.

In 1998 San Graatsma a Dutchmen behind the Mosaique Vivant foundation, after hearing Minyeshu sing invited her to join the group Africa-Unite as vocalist. The Africa-Unite group consisted of musicians from Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia. They released the cd Africa-Unite under Mosaique Vivant. Minyeshu soon afterwards moved to Eindhoven, and some time later together with former members of Africa-Unite group decided to form their own band, Chewata. Married to Eric van de Lest who also worked with her as being the co- producer/songwriter /drummer on the albums "Dire Dawa" (2012) ,"Daa-Dee"(2018) and "Netsa" (2012).

In 2003 she performed with Marco Borsato in the Friends for War Child concert.^[3] She sang in different intercultural collaborations: with Zoumana Diarra and Anton Goudsmit in the project Maliblu,^[4] and with Marlène Dorcén en Talike in Perles d'Amour.^[5] At the 2007 New Year's concert Minyeshu performed with the Nederlands Blazers Ensemble in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.^[6][7]

She combines traditional elements from the Horn of Africa with influences from modern western music. Some of her songs are based on the rhythms of Eskista, an Ethiopian ‘‘schoulder dance.’’ Her mother tongue is Amharic, but she also sings in other African languages such as Sidama. When asked in an interview whether she can sings all those languages smoothly, she answered; ‘‘I can really only speak Amharic, but not all my friends are Amharas, so the other languages are translated for me, and i enjoy performing songs in their languages as well.’’^[1]

In 2011 Minyeshu came in contact with Stefan Kruger and Stefan Schmid from (Zuco 103) Ensemble and guitarist Paul Willemsen (Lefties Soul Connection), started a collaboration that would lead to the release of the album Black Ink in 2013.^[8] In the summer of 2013 during the project 'Azalai' Minyeshu performed in the Melkweg, Amsterdam Open Air, the Sfinks Festival in Antwerpen, the Exit Festival in Novi Sad and Sziget Festival in Budapest.^[9]

In 2023 she appeared with her new 11 piece band at the North Sea Jazz Festival.

With Chewata: / Minyeshu

• 2002: Meba^[10]
• 2008: Dire Dawa^[11]
• 2013: Black Ink^[12]
• 2018: Daa Dee^[13]
• 2022 Netsa https://www.arcmusic.co.uk/blog/netsa-minyeshu.html