[2] His mastering of the accordion, as well as the keyboard and his talent for "re-purposing folk songs into funkier modern melodies," defined his contribution to popular music in Ethiopia.

In the period, it was harder for working bands in the region to make a living, after Mengistu's Derg government-imposed breaks to Addis Ababa's nightlife, but the music was still being regularly recorded, and cassettes were the typical release format, given they were easy to duplicate and distribute.

As a side project, Mergia joined the Dhalak Band around this period and recorded the cassette-only Wede Harer Guzo (1978) with them, a jazz-infused album with a dominance of improvisation.

[5] The studio belonged to an acquaintance that Mergia met at Howard University, where he had begun studying music, and the impetus for the album was picking up an accordion, an "instrument he hadn't touched in decades.

[3] For the album, he worked alone and used his accordion, a Rhodes piano, a drum machine, and, according to contrasting accounts, a Yamaha DX7 keyboard or Moog synthesiser (or both), and arranged a set of old Ethiopian songs with the mostly modern selection of instruments.

[3][7] Writer Donal Dineen wrote that the album was a "step into the unknown," given its fusion of a sound familiar to Mergia with "modern technology that was dramatically altering the musical landscape in the US.

[4] Mergia felt that many people in Ethiopia had fond memories of the accordion and the popular songs that featured it, and intended the album to bring the instrument to prominence again.

[2] Nonetheless, Australian news website ABC felt the album had the electric organ at its core, and noted its influence from the Ethiopian jazz scene from which Mergia originated.

Behind these solos, he uses the keyboard to create buzzy bass lines and the Rhodes piano to apply chords and texture, while the drum machine patterns refrain from deviating during the tracks, although Mergia occasionally augments the "rhythmic push" with a style of vocals "halfway between beatboxing and chanting.

"[4] Christgau disagreed with the notions of the album being psychedelic or futuristic, instead finding it to be "spare, nostalgic, and passing strange," and describing it as a type of cocktail music that, unlike other examples of the genre, possesses a very different tune base and what he felt was "the necessity of reducing music Americans now know primarily from Éthiopiques horn bands to simple pattern, momentary idiosyncrasy, and painful longing.

[15] Awesome Tapes from Africa subsequently re-released Hailu Megia & His Classical Instrument on 25 June 2013 in the United States as a CD, LP, cassette and download.

[2] Having not played live for some 20 years, Mergia missed touring,[4] and the album's re-release caused the 67-year-old musician to wonder what performing music outside his Washington home would be like.

"[21] Stewart Smith of The List called the re-release "another gem" from the Awesome Tapes from Africa label, and complimented the album's dreamy, blessed-out sound.

[10] Chris Richards of The Washington Post recalled how the cassette "meshed the sound of a forgotten folk instrument with strange, futuristic timbres" and called it an album "that simultaneously pointed toward Ethiopia’s musical past and future.

The hypnotic tunes are soothed by occasional flourishes of gentle songcraft from a voice so warm it could have been stirred up on some savannah breeze aeons ago.

"[5] Fact Magazine later ranked the album at number 5 on their list of "The 50 best reissues of 2013," where they called it "serpentine Ethiopian jazz" which "trades in the usual folk instruments for big fat beefy synth leads.

Tangari felt one of the aspects which separates the Mergia album from other Ethiopian music "is the fact that it was made in solitude, and specifically out of longing for a vanished past.