Meklit is an Ethio-American vocalist, songwriter and composer known for her electric stage presence and innovative, deeply personal Ethio-Jazz songs.
Her performances have taken her around the world, from Addis Ababa - where she is a full blown star - to San Francisco, NYC, Chicago, Nairobi, Cairo, Montreal, London, Zurich, Rome, Helsinki and many more. Meklit’s latest album “When the People Move, the Music Moves Too” was named amongst the best records of the year by Bandcamp and The Sunday Times UK, climbing to the top of the iTunes, NACC, and European World Charts.
Meklit is a National Geographic Explorer, a TED Senior Fellow, and a former Artist-in-Residence at Harvard University. She has collaborated with folks like Kronos Quartet, Andrew Bird, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and musical legend Pee Wee Ellis. She has also been commissioned to create new work by Lincoln Center, MAP Fund, the Center for Cultural Innovation, Meany Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Washington, Montgomery College and more.
Meklit is the co-founder, host and co-producer of Movement, a new podcast and live show telling stories of music and migration, which debuted in a nationally syndicated broadcast on PRX’s The World. She is the co-founder of the Nile Project, a featured voice in the UN Women theme song and the winner of the 2021 globalFEST Artist Award. Meklit’s music has been featured in the New York Times, BBC, CNN, NPR, Washington Post, Vibe Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe and many more. She holds a BA in Political Science from Yale University.
Photo by: Saul Metnick for Bulleit Burbon
culturE Work
MOVEMENT
Movement is both a podcast, a broadcast and a live show, exploring global migration through music, with stories that hit listeners at the level of the hips, the heart and the head. The podcast debuted in 2020 as a nationally syndicated broadcast on PRX’s The World. The live show debuts at the University of Washington’s Meany Center for the Performing Arts as part of their 2021-2022 season. Movement is hosted by Meklit and was co-created by Meklit, sound designer/producer Ian Coss and editor/producer Julie Caine.
CHIEF OF PROGRAM AT YBCA
Meklit is the Chief of Program at YBCA, an anchor arts and culture institution in San Francisco, focusing on artists working on behalf of the health and wellbeing of communities.
PAST - THE NILE PROJECT
The Nile Project was founded in August 2011 by Meklit and Egyptian ethnomusicologist Mina Girgis to address the Nile basin’s cultural and environmental challenges using an innovative approach that combines music, education and an enterprise platform. The Nile Project curated collaborations among musicians from the 11 Nile countries to expose audiences to the cultures of their river neighbors. These musical experiences foster cross-cultural empathy and inspire environmental curiosity to shift the Nile from a divisive geopolitical argument to a uniting East-African conversation. In partnership with local universities, interactive workshops and free online courses educate students and help them discover their unique roles in creating a more sustainable Nile Basin. Meklit was active in the project from 2011 through 2015. www.nileproject.org
PAST ARTIST RESIDENCIES
PAST ARTIST COMMISSIONS
Center for Cultural Innovation, MAP Fund, San Francisco Arts Commission, Home [Away From} Home Project at YBCA.
grants
Meklit’s work has been supported by grants from
MAP Fund, the Oakland Cultural Funding Project, the Belle Foundation for Cultural Development, Zellerbach Family Foundation and many more.
WALTER MOSLEY'S WORDS
I met renowned author Walter Mosley backstage at West Coast Live in 2010, and we became fast friends. While we were recording the 2014 album We Are Alive, he spent three days with us in the studio - reminding us that a good studio session is always a hang - and subsequently wrote the liner notes to the record. Here are his very kind words. Thank you, dear Walter.
SEEKING A UNIFIED FIELD
"One day, over a year ago, I was having a conversation with Meklit. I don’t remember what we were talking about exactly but it probably had to do with business versus the heart of art. Out of nowhere, it seemed, she turned to me and said, “You know, Walter, GPS satellites, between the theories of Special and General Relativity, run thirty-six microseconds faster than any earthbound clock each day. They have to be constantly reset in order to do their job.”
This comment, I remember, put whatever it was we were discussing into startling perspective. She was saying, in essence, that the world doesn’t bend for us, that we must make ourselves a part of the greater whole in all of its fluctuations and deviations.
I wasn’t surprised by the unexpected insight because I had come to understand that Meklit’s mind is always soaring above the world we think we know. Her music, her politics, her deft and generous understanding of a world constantly in motion all transcend the mundane, the expected and clichéd reactions that most of us are programmed with. Like an elder jazz musician or quintessential classical composer she always hits just the right note.
And she has quite a range to choose from. Her voice runs easily over two and a half octaves, from that sweet high note down into the blues register; her culture is somewhere between Ethiopia and the East Bay; and her mind moves effortlessly from Einstein to the banal task of finding your way home via GPS. Meklit is constantly bringing together the tattered corners of a disparate and fragmented world.
We Are Alive proves all of that and more. This musically exquisite collection of songs does for popular culture what Einstein wanted to do for General Relativity and electromagnetism: it brings together the so-called genres of music with continents of feeling across an ocean of lament; it celebrates our blood and our secret minds all the while exposing our frail humanity in light of the immortal compassion of the human heart. These are love songs, certainly, but not the trivial fare of wanting my baby back or hot bodies rockin’ in the moonlight. We Are Alive is about the passion of life, about the wonder and the capacity for hope in all women and men drawing us together in arrangements at once so raw and so sophisticated that one may just begin to believe that it is possible to live in this world, in these skins, without conceding to institutionalized terrorism or the Company Store.
Like Johnny Mathis, Billie Holiday, and the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald Meklit has taken all that jazz has to offer and then broadcast it back to us in a popular mode. We don’t have to reach for her music because it beckons to us. We don’t have to be trained in order to understand the highly-developed themes of her lyrics because Meklit’s music is a spiritual gravity for our hearts. She spins her songs and we drift unerringly toward a common center."
-Walter Mosley, March 2014