Meklit’s Music takes off on an Odyssey from Africa

May 17, 2016 | By Andrew Gilbert

About five years ago, Meklit Hadero had a life-changing encounter with one of her formative musical heroes. In the midst of an East African tour with her band and the Arba Minch Collective, a project she helped launch in 2009 to bring together fellow Ethiopian American artists, Meklit found herself performing in front of Mulatu Astatke, the pianist-composer who helped spark Ethiopia’s 1960s musical renaissance.


Smitten with her voice, Astatke told her she needed to leave his music behind and pursue her own sound. “He took me to task and he tasked me,” said the singer-songwriter, who goes by simply Meklit, in a recent conversation at a cafe a few blocks from her South Berkeley studio. “It took me a while to digest that. It’s a big thing to have someone like that say that to you. I sat with it for a couple of years.”

The show Meklit brings to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which kicks off Thursday, May 19, and runs through Saturday, May 21, is titled “This Was Made Here: A Diasporic Odyssey” and is the fruit of a long and creatively fecund gestation. Rather than locking herself away to search her soul, Meklit found bountiful inspiration and raw material for a new sound through her work in the Nile Project, the visionary collective she co-founded with Egyptian ethnomusicologist Mina Girgis that brings together musicians from 11 nations traversed by the world’s longest river.

After two residencies in the region and months on the road with the collective over the first half of 2015, Meklit returned to the East Bay and wrote 25 songs in 12 weeks, fulfilling a commission from the MAP Fund, a program that supports innovation in live performance and cross-cultural exploration.


It’s no coincidence that her instrumental palette expanded considerably after she toured with the 12-piece Nile Project, with two Ethiopian singers, Astu and Tesdi, as backup vocalists; a four-piece horn section with saxophonist Howard Wiley; drummer Colin Douglas and percussionist Marco Peris; and bassist-arranger Sam Bevan (an essential Meklit collaborator).

“The Nile Project was an amazing experience in terms of giving me the capacity to write and arrange for a large ensemble,” said Meklit, adding that she even did a “mini-apprenticeship” with Ethopian saxophonist Jorga Mesfin. “I was also the section leader for the chorus, which was a huge learning experience.”

More than anything, Meklit’s new body of songs calibrates the oft-shifting emotional currents that shape diasporic consciousness, a yin-yang pleasure-pain equation embodied by the two “This Was Made Here” covers. She arranged a striking version of “Ye Tintu Tiz Alegn,” a classic Amharic song by the great “golden age” Ethiopian singer Tilahun Gessesse. It was a song many first encountered on Miriam Makeba’s 1972 album “Pata Pata.” Then she crafted an Ethiopian-jazz interpretation of “You Got Me,” the 1999 hit by the Roots and Erykah Badu, which provided a jolt of visibility for her as a teenager with Black Thought’s line: “Met this Ethiopian queen from Philly taking classes abroad.”

“Those little mentions of Ethiopia back then were huge for me, like little social recognitions that reverberated in the communities around me,” she said. “Ethiopia was more than those stereotypes that I was constantly encountering.”

The new music ranges widely across various styles and always seems to circle back to Ethiopian influences, like a popular style called tizita with a keening, bittersweet edge. Meklit explained tizita’s intoxicating appeal, citing the research of a TED fellow, Dr. Charles Limb, a surgeon and UC San Francisco professor who studies the neurological effects of music on the human brain.

“If you look at people’s brains, there’s a correlation between sad music and pleasure,” Meklit said. “In an MRI you see the reward center light up. Tizita embodies that experience, with this haunting sound about loss and remembrance that’s so sweet and satisfying.”

 

 

Website: www.meklitmusic.com

 

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