Meklit is an Ethio-American vocalist, singer-songwriter and composer, making music that sways between cultures and continents. Known for her electric stage presence, innovative take on Ethio-Jazz, and her fiery, emotive live shows, Meklit has rocked stages from Addis Ababa (where she is a household name) to San Francisco (her beloved home-base), to New York, London, DC, Montreal, Nairobi, Chicago, LA, Arusha, Rome, Zurich, Rio Di Janeiro, Seattle, Cairo, and more.

Her fame in Ethiopia skyrocketed in 2015 when her TED talk went viral in the country and her music videos began playing daily on multiple Ethiopian television stations. She goes back to Addis Ababa regularly to perform.

Meklit is a TED Senior Fellow and her TED Talk, The Unexpected Beauty of Everyday Sounds, has been watched by more than 1.2 million people. She is a National Geographic Explorer and has been an Artist-in-Residence at Harvard, NYU, Purdue and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Meklit has received musical commissions from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the MAP Fund and has toured extensively across the US, UK, and East Africa. She has collaborated with Kronos Quartet, NASA Kepler Co-Investigator Dr. Jon Jenkins (and his star sounds), musical legend Pee Wee Ellis and members of the BBC Philharmonic. She is a Co-Founder of the Nile Project, served as musical director for the beloved Bay Area powerhouse UnderCover Presents, and sang alongside Angelique Kidjo and Anoushka Shankar as a featured singer in the UN Women Theme Song.

Meklit's album - When the People Move, the Music Moves Too - was released June 23rd on Six Degrees Records, receiving rave reviews and quickly reaching #4 on the iTunes World Music Charts, #1 on the NACC World Charts and #12 on the World Charts in Europe. It was also named one of the 100 Best Albums of 2017 by the Sunday Times UK, one of the Best Soul Albums of 2017 by Bandcamp and amongst the 10 Best Bay Area albums of 2017 by KQED. These 11 songs were deeply inspired by Mulatu Astatke (the Godfather of Ethio-Jazz). Back in 2011, he told Meklit, "find your contribution to Ethio-Jazz and keep on innovating!" Produced by multi-GRAMMY winning artist/songwriter Dan Wilson (Adele, John Legend, Dixie Chicks), the album also features world renowned musicians Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the violinist/whistler Andrew Bird. 

Meklit has been featured in The New York Times, NPR, Vibe Magazine, CNN International, USA Today, Wall St. Journal, New York Magazine, MTV Iggy, Gizmodo, PBS, PRI’s The World, BBC Africa, BBC World Service, BBC Women’s Hour, BBC Front Row, BBC Loose Ends, The New Yorker, Brain Pickings, Wired UK, OkayAfrica, AfroPop, Google Music, Relix Magazine, Pidgeons + Planes, KEXP, WBEZ, WNYC, KQED, KBLX, Live Wire Radio, CBS Bay Area, CBS San Diego, Chicago Sun Times, Seattle Times, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, La Presse (Montreal), The Village Voice, Dig Boston, Seattle Weekly, San Francisco Magazine, SF Bay Guardian and many more.

She has played at festivals and venues in the US, the UK and East Africa, including: Monterey Jazz Festival, SFJAZZ Center, Bumbershoot, SXSW, Southbank Centre, Hollywood Bowl, TED Conferences (Rio Di Janeiro, Edinburgh, Oxford, Long Beach, Arusha), Lincoln Center, Grand Performances, The Schomburg, the Apollo, YBCA, Davies Symphony Hall, Skirball Center (NYC + LA), Winter Jazz Fest, Smithsonian Folklife Fest, Kennedy Center, Stern Grove, World Cafe Live, Nuits D’Afrique (Montreal), Moods (Zurich), The Monk (Rome), Chicago World Music Festival, Gondar Castles (World Heritage Site - Ethiopia), Mulatu Astatke's Africa Jazz Village (Addis Ababa), Aswan Cultural Palace (Egypt), Blankets +Wine (Nairobi), National Theater (Uganda).

Meklit’s work has been supported by grants from National Geographic, California Humanities, the MAP Fund, the Center for Cultural Innovation, Panta Rhea Foundation, The Creative Work Fund, The Christensen Fund, San Francisco Arts Commission, Zellerbach Family Foundation, Intersection for the Arts, Grants for the Arts, the San Francisco Foundation, Oakland Cultural Funding Project, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, The Belle Foundation for Cultural Development and more.

Meklit holds a BA from Yale University.

THE ALBUM BIO: WHEN THE PEOPLE MOVE, THE MUSIC MOVES TOO: 

There are many well-appointed rooms in the mansion that is Meklit, and her breathtaking new album sounds at home in every one. The Ethiopian-born Oakland- based artist has belted “Cold Sweat” with James Brown saxophonist Pee Wee Ellis, co-founded the visionary pan-African Nile Project ensemble, and lectures widely about liminal identities as a TED Senior Fellow. Along the way she’s released a series of disparate recordings documenting her evolution as a songwriter, vocalist and bandleader. When the People Move, the Music Moves Too, slated for June 23, 2017 release on Six Degrees Records, reveals her startlingly beautiful new sound that seamlessly merges East Africa and the African diaspora via an intimate, rhythmically charged body of songs recorded in Addis Ababa, Los Angeles, New Orleans and San Francisco. 

A collaboration with Grammy Award-winning songwriter and producer Dan Wilson (Adele, Dixie Chicks, Taylor Swift), the album is built on Meklit’s jazz-steeped working-band featuring bassist Sam Bevan, drummer Colin Douglas, and Marco Peris Coppola on tupan drum. Meklit accompanies her translucent, soul-sated vocals on guitar and the six-string krar, an Ethiopian lyre, while Howard Wiley provides pleasingly pungent counterpoint on tenor and baritone saxophones. 

She’s joined by a far-flung array of masters, including Andrew Bird on violin and whistling, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band horns, plus a triumvirate of traditional Ethiopian musicians, and top-shelf players from LA and the Bay Area. All of these deep musical currents flow into Meklit’s shimmering, dance-inducing sound, which turns the San Francisco Bay Area into a jazz outpost of Ethio-Crescent City soul. As the album’s title suggests, Meklit makes music about movement, about bodies transporting culture through space and time, and the power of sound to set people and social movements in motion. 

“This is what happens when an Ethiopian family comes as refugees to the United States, and makes social and cultural contributions in all kinds of ways,” says Meklit. “It’s impossible not to think about where American culture is going. Who are we? How can we have a more inclusive society? This is Ethiopian-American music, and it’s what I’ve been reaching toward for a decade.”

The album kicks off with “This Was Made Here,” a percussively poetic exploration of displacement and longing for home that builds to a lithe solo by Tassew Wondem on the Ethiopian reed flute, or washint. While Ethiopian cadences wend through the entire album, the influences move to the foreground on the traditional Amharic poetry of Yerakeh Yeresal” and the quietly mesmerizing “Yesterday is a Tizita.” Suffused with a sense of delicious ache best described by the Portuguese term “saudade,” the song flows from Meklit’s cascading lines on krar to Tassew Wondem’s ethereal washint to Randal Fisher’s red-clay tenor. 

“I wanted that kind of conversation,” Meklit says. “Tassew, Endris and Messele are some of my favorite musicians on the planet and they are innovators in the way they think. Sometimes people put traditional music in a box, that this is the past. But that’s not fair or true, they’re expansive, right in there, mixing it up.”

If “This Was Made Here” sets the scene for When the People Move, the galloping “I Want to Sing for Them All” is Meklit’s manifesto, the piece in which she lays claim to every artist and sound that has crossed her meandering path. Dan Wilson brought the Preservation Hall horns into her orbit, and they provide a tidal surge of brass on “You Are My Luck,” a piece propelled by the tupan of Marco Peris Coppola (who also leads the great Balkan brass ensemble Inspector Gadje). 

“New Orleans is the birth place of jazz and it’s a city of hybridity and cultural collision. Being there, you feel the crossroads,” Meklit says. “Jazz as a cultural innovation sprang from the forced migration and enslavement of African peoples and you can’t talk about American culture without acknowledging that. I’m particularly interested in where African and African-American musics meet. I crafted the songs to express an expansive understanding of the American “we” that reflects present-time movements of people too, specifically the Ethiopian diaspora. I wanted to celebrate that community, and dance to it, and let everybody into it. 

When the People Move, the Music Moves Too is the result of a fateful encounter Meklit experienced in Addis Ababa with the legendary vibraphonist/composer Mulatu Astatke, who helped spark Ethiopia’s 1960s musical renaissance. She was deeply engaged with his music at the time, but he pushed her to think about how to bring her own experiences into her songs.  

“He was very pointed with me, saying several times ‘You keep innovating!’” she recalls. “He took me to task and he tasked me. 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.”

Meklit and her music have embodied multiplicity since she first started performing at San Francisco’s Red Poppy Art House in the mid-aughts. Born in Ethiopia, she moved with her family to Iowa at the age of two, and spent much of her adolescence in Brooklyn, soaking up the sounds of hip hop on the street. After studying political science at Yale she spent a couple of years in Seattle and then moved to San Francisco, looking to immerse herself in the city’s thriving arts scene. 

As Co-Director at the Red Poppy she quickly found a creative community and started gaining attention in 2006 with the stylistically polyglot band Nefasha Ayer (which means “the wind that travels” in the Ethiopian Semitic language Amharic). 

Since the release of her acclaimed 2010 debut album On A Day Like This… (Porto Franco Records), Meklit has become an international force. As TED Global and Senior Fellow, she launched the Arba Minch Collective, a group of expat Ethiopian artists devoted to nurturing ties to their homeland by collaborating with traditional and contemporary artists back home. She also delved into American soul music with rising Oakland singer/songwriter Quinn DeVeaux on 2012’s Meklit & Quinn (Porto Franco Records), putting an indelible stamp on songs by Lou Reed, Sam Cooke, Arcade Fire, Stevie Wonder, and Talking Heads. Her soul queen coronation took place on stage at Yoshi’s, where she made a memorable appearance as part of saxophonist Pee Wee Ellis’s show “Still Black, Still Proud: An African Tribute to James Brown.”

Meklit’s Six Degrees debut, 2014’s We Are Alive, catapulted Meklit into global prominence as a singer/songwriter, garnering rapturous reviews and an uproariously entertaining video “Kemekem (I Like Your Afro).” At the same time she was co-founding the visionary Nile Project with Egyptian ethnomusicologist Mina Girgis. With a collective ensemble bringing together over 30 East African artists who hail from the 11 countries traversed by the Nile, the organization has evolved into a creative force introducing new ideas for preserving and protecting the life-giving river and the peoples who depend on it. She’s on hiatus from the Collective these days, but her experiences collaborating with fellow East African musicians made a profound impact on her sound. 

“I choose to have a more percussive approach to the drum kit,” Meklit says. “I’m always thinking about America and Ethiopia, about how the hybridization is going to work in both places. Through the Nile Project I became obsessed with the power of multiple percussionists. In my band, I got addicted to having two drummers. It’s key to making folks dance.”

The lapidary orchestrations were created by Meklit herself, with the help of her bassist Sam Bevan. But Meklit is quick to credit Dan Wilson’s lithe musical mind with a major role in shaping the ultimate sound of the record, in addition to his contribution of co-writing two songs. A prolific songwriter, arranger and producer, Wilson has worked with a mind-boggling array of artists, and he seemed to know exactly which player to place where to accentuate Meklit’s sound. He brought in Ethio-Cali’s tenor saxophonist Randall Fisher, who plays a perfectly calibrated Ethio-jazz intro on “You Got Me.” And Ethiopian-born, LA-based keyboardist Kibrome Birhane’s spare piano work levitates “Yesterday is a Tizita.” Meklit describes how Wilson’s songwriting precision, and razor sharp, generous feedback helped to weave a remarkable clarity into the music, enhancing Meklit’s already vivid hues. Rather than adding pieces to an already intricate design, he helps the elements coalesce into incandescent sound that captures a capaciously creative artist in all her glory. 

“In the past what’s happened is that every song or album has taken more weight from one set of influences,” Meklit says. “On We Are Alive one song is more singer/songwriter, one is more jazz, and one is more Ethiopian. Meklit and Quinn is about singer/songwriters. The Nile Project is more East African. But on this album it’s all there. I finally understood how to bring every influence into every song.” 

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