COVER: Melody mediator

Meklit Hadero on her many musical endeavours—including a hip hop space opera—and her efforts to build musical bridges in Africa

With a voice as fresh as the flower that’s always tucked into her hair, Meklit Hadero mixes genres and styles, as comfortable with Ethiopian jazz as San Francisco coffeehouse folk. Always active, she’s releasing two albums this year, is a TED senior fellow (a title bestowed upon “young world-changers” in the fields of Technology, Entertainment and Design) and has put together the Arba Minch arts collective, a group that aims to create cultural links between Ethiopia and the rest of the world, so named for a town in Southern Ethiopia. But that’s not all. With the Nile Project, Meklit wishes, through music, to draw together the countries, cultures and communities that lie on the famed African river. No wonder, when asked for a description of herself and her work, Meklit replies, “I like being a paragraph rather than a sentence,” laughing.

In advance of her second appearance in Montreal, Meklit spoke to the Mirror about music, community and her love for our city.

Mirror: You have East African influences, but your music is also jazzy and folky. How would you describe your music?

Meklit Hadero: Pretty much how you just described it. That’s pretty accurate. I usually talk about it as sitting at the intersection of jazz, folk and some Ethiopian influences, especially in the way that I sing and the vocal style. So it’s all three of those things together in an improvisation.

M: Your show at last summer’s Nuits d’Afrique was very well received.

MH: I completely fell in love with Montreal. I really, really did. And I hope that I get to spend an extended period of time there at some point. The thing that I really liked the most and the thing that was inspiring was I felt like there was an openness to music there, and an openness of the audience to really go with you as a performer. It’s actually really rare in terms of all the touring that I’ve done, and I just found it to be a very special place. The people were just so warm, and it was amazing.

M: Can you tell me a little bit about what you’ve been working on musically?

MH: I have been working on two new albums, one of which is going to be out in April of 2012, and that is a trio called CopperWire. It’s actually completely different music than what you’ve heard from me so far. It’s with two other Ethio-American MCs, Gabriel Teodros and Burntface. The three of us made a hip hop space opera where we use metaphors of galaxy distances and space travel to talk about diaspora and cultural connection. It’s a really exciting project. We got star sounds from NASA to use in our beats and I’m also playing an electro mix of star sounds on the guitar in live shows.

The next album after that will be a duo collaboration between myself and Quinn DeVeaux. Quinn is a soul singer based in Oakland and we’re doing covers of indie rock and art rock songs, but also some originals. But we are looking at the soul roots of indie rock and art rock. And I’m also working on new songs for my next solo record, which will be more like 2013.

THE SOUND OF THE RIVER

M: I can’t help but think of the Weeknd’s recent video for “The Knowing” when you talk about the first project. Do you think that there is now a renaissance of Ethiopian music?

MH: I think that every generation has new definitions for itself, because of its experiences being different, in a different moment in time, a different moment in history and different experi­ences in life. We all love [Ethio-jazz master] Mulatu Astatke and we actually got to meet him when we were in Ethiopia together. Gabriel, Burntface and I were all in Ethiopia in May and we got to have coffee with Mulatu many times and sit with him and listen to all his stories of music. He was so encouraging to us and he said to us, “You guys just keep innovating—do your thing.” So he wasn’t telling us to do the traditional thing. We are artists who, in a big way, relate to our Ethiopianness. We carry it with us, but also it is in no way a complete definition of who we are as people or artists. For all of us, I think we really hold experimentation and expansion and growth as an essential part of the creative process. That brings in new approaches, while at the same time loving the things that are considered classic.

M: Can you tell me about the Nile Project?

MH: The Nile Project is a new initiative that I started with an Egyptian ethnomusicologist named Mina Girgis. Together we’re bringing musicians from across the Nile basin countries to collabo­rate on music, tour along the river and around the world. The idea is that music can serve as such a fantastic way of communicating amongst cultures.

Mina tells stories about how, growing up in Egypt, she never heard Ethiopian music even though there is so much that the countries have in common and so much that they share, including the river. But yet, in order to hear Ethiopian music, she either has to go to Ethiopia or go to London, New York or San Francisco—which is where Mina discovered Ethiopian music. But why is there so little cultural communication amongst the countries in Africa? There’s a kind of information barrier that’s really tough to overcome. And it’s the same with other countries. When you are in Ethiopia, you can’t hear Egyptian music or Ugandan music.

And how do we learn about our neighbours who share so much with us? So this project is really about creating cross-Nile basin cultural communication. There’s a lot of political communi­cation that has to do with sharing water resources, that has to do with mediating drought and climate change, but how do we talk to each other as people? How do we create connections amongst people? Music is a powerful tool for that. And I am interested not just in performing music, but in understanding how music connects us to one another and how we can grow and mature our relationships through that cultural dialogue. ■