Meklit performs tonight at West Vancouver Memorial Library at 7:30 p.m., 1950 Marine Dr., West Vancouver. Free. Presented by BlueShore Financial Centre for the Performing Arts in partnership with the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival.
The title track off of Meklit Hadero's latest album We Are Alive is based on two different five-count rhythms, a traditional Sudanese beat and a Radiohead song.
It's a prime example of how the San Francisco-based musician blends the singer-songwriter tradition with elements of East African music, New York jazz, folk, soul and a medley of other influences.
Meklit (known simply by her first name) was born in Ethiopia and raised in Brooklyn. She studied political science at Yale University and has lived in the Bay area for more than a decade.
"I think of the places that I've lived as being also my sonic homelands," she says, "and all of those sounds of the places that make up my history and make me who I am all come out in the music."
Meklit didn't officially become a musician until she moved out west. Quickly drawn into San Francisco's rich arts and entertainment scene, she started taking voice lessons and picked up the guitar. Previous to her formal musical training, she had been known to croon on buses and in elevators as a child. "And in high school I would sing at the occasional event, or in college I would sing at an open mic or two - always an a cappella song."
The switch from political science student to professional singer-songwriter was not the dramatic change of course it might sound like, Meklit explains.
"I also took many classes in anthropology and literature," she says, "basically I was just interested in the world and I was interested in learning how to learn."
Her critical analyses and ideas needed to be expressed somehow and music turned out to be a fitting outlet.
"So, the transition from being a student of political science into being a musician was a slow one, but it's also one that has a lot more through lines than I think it appears."Meklit wrote her first song in 2005, around the time she fell in love with Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso's song "O Leãozinho" which she thought was about a lion cub.
"Later I found out it's about his son who's a Leo, so actually I was wrong about the meaning, but it still led me to this insight that I carry with me all the time which is that we can write songs about whatever it is that happens to be inspiring us or moving us or making us curious or making us laugh." While there is certainly a place for love songs, Melkit knows there is also a place for songs about reflection, our animal selves, and aspirations for the future.
"Writing songs is like breathing," she says. "It's everything. It's the whole range. It's the tragic, it's the comic, it's the gorgeous, it's the terrifying."Though she was only two when her family left Ethiopia for the U.S., Meklit has returned to her home country many times and forged creative relationships with prominent figures in the Addis Ababa arts community. She co-founded the Nile Project with Egyptian ethno-musicologist Mina Girgis.The coalition brings musicians together from 11 countries in the Nile basin and just wrapped up a four-month U.S. tour with the group."The music is just fantastic and being involved as a musician has been one of the most creatively exciting projects. .. it's like being in a music school that doesn't exist anywhere in the world," she says. "The idea is that music can be a model for the kind of relationships that we'd like to see our countries and our cultures having."
Ever evolving as an artist, Meklit recently stumbled upon a recording of one of her very first concerts and had a listen.
"I think the main difference is that I started out almost entirely coming from a place of a singer-songwriter. My first EP, Eight Songs, was just me and a guitar, and a few songs had cello on it."Over the last decade, she says she has grown as a jazz singer and has developed an even deeper relationship with Ethiopian music, particularly Ethio-jazz. When she takes the stage Friday night at West Vancouver Memorial Library, she will be joined by an upright bass player, drummer and trumpet player.
"The live show for us is the real meat of what we do and why we do it and we love playing for the people and taking them through experiencing everything form very intimate songs to anthemic songs."
When Meklit sings in Amharic or plays East African melodies, it may sound unfamiliar to a North American audience, she says. "But then they feel the jazz and the blues that they understand and so it becomes this opening of an idea - the idea being maybe we don't have to be strangers to each other."
