Aster Aweke (Amharic: አስቴር አወቀ) is an Ethiopian singer-songwriter born in Gondar in 1959, in what was then Begemder Province and is now Amhara Region. Wikipedia, drawing on biographical references including Bradt and AllMusic, places her childhood move to Addis Ababa with her father, a senior civil servant in the imperial government of Haile Selassie, and notes that she is Gurage. The same record says her family opposed a musical career. In a 1990 interview with Amy Duncan of The Christian Science Monitor, as cited on her Wikipedia page, she said her family opposed her and that she kept going because music made her happy.
What she listened to is also on that page, not inferred here. She followed Ethiopian singers Tilahun Gessesse and Bizunesh Bekele and American singers Donna Summer and Aretha Franklin. At thirteen she decided to join the Hager Fikir Theatre and auditioned by singing a Bizunesh song, aiming to enter as a dancer and vocalist. In her teens she worked the Addis Ababa club circuit with Shebelle Band, Roha Band, Ibex Band, and Hotel D’Afrique Band. Wikipedia dates the start of her solo recordings to 1977 and says a debut album that year was followed by three more albums within the year. The live artist entry on ethio.music currently names a different early band and a different production credit for the international debut; this profile follows the Wikipedia account instead of that shorter text.
In 1981 she left for the United States. Wikipedia says she settled first in the San Francisco Bay Area and within two years moved to Washington, D.C., where she performed in restaurants and clubs and briefly attended Northern Virginia Community College in computer science, alongside formal music study she did not take to. Her international album Aster came out on the British independent Triple Earth in 1989 and on Columbia in 1990. The follow-up, Kabu (1991), is listed on Columbia/CBS. Later international titles on the Wikipedia discography are Ebo (1994, Barkhanns) and Live in London (1995, Barkhanns). She also appears as a contributing artist on Ethiopian Groove: The Golden Seventies (Buda Musique, 1994), Unwired (World Music Network, 1999), and The Rough Guide to the Music of Ethiopia (2004).
In 1997, more than fifteen years after leaving, she returned to Ethiopia. AllMusic, quoted on Wikipedia, says thousands of followers were at the airport. She then founded Kabu Records. The label’s album run on the Wikipedia discography is Hagere (1999), Sugar (2001), Aster’s Ballads (2004), Fikir (2006), Checheho (2010), Ewedhalew (2013), Musica (2017), Sebebu (2017), Chewa (2019), Soba (3 January 2023), and Gela Gela (7 July 2026), the last with a premiere listening event at the Sheraton Addis. Wikipedia also notes a featured single, “Taitu” (2014), with Yegna, and a cafeteria in Addis Ababa called Kabu, named after the song, which ceased operations in 2015. A separate Wikipedia page for the album Kabu says that 1991 Columbia release peaked at No. 4 on Billboard’s World Music chart and that she sang it in Amharic, with production by Iain Scott and Bunt Stafford Clark and a mix that included soul, raï, and Ethiopian instruments including the krar.
ethio.music does not treat her as a historical name only. The desk’s September 2026 chart research, in the sources snapshot of 20 September, still logged Aster titles drawing weekly view adds on YeneVibe. No official YouTube channel is named in the local bios, so this profile does not attach a video link. Genres listed on Wikipedia are Ethiopian music, Ethio-jazz, and soul-jazz. The “Queen of Ethiopian Pop” styling is the phrase used on her Wikipedia lead, attributed there to published coverage, not a rank invented for this page.
Sources: Wikipedia, Aster Aweke (fetched 29 September 2026); Wikipedia, Kabu (album); ethio.music charts sources snapshot, 20 September 2026. The artist page at /artist/aster-aweke is a short public stub and is not the source for the dates above.
Related: Tilahun Gessesse, one of the singers she followed, also has an ethio.music profile; see also the ethio.music charts.
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