Meklit Hadero: Arts and Music Behind the Redwood Curtain

I had the pleasure last night of seeing Meklit Hadero perform at the Arcata Playhouse. Born in Ethiopia, she grew up in Iowa, New York, and Florida. After studying political science at Yale, she moved to San Francisco. Hadero became deeply involved with the Red Poppy Art House for a few years while she learned all the elements of show production and performed regularly fine tuning her craft and sound. 

The Red Poppy Art House was established in 2003 as a neighborhood micro-center for artistic and intercultural life in San Francisco. Operating from an urban storefront of 650 square feet, it seeks to demonstrate the unique, powerful and irreplaceable capacity of small and intimate spaces, charting the course for an alternative model for community engagement in the arts - Red poppy art house

Hadero is a Singer and a poet, blending elements of Ethiopian, soul, jazz, and hip hop.  Her voice is smooth and controlled rolling into a tenor pulsating vibrato. With a slight crisp gesture, a nod, a count, her fellow musicians respond to her as if they were the heartbeat in her chest and blood pulsing through her veins. She took us all on a journey from her birth place of Ethiopia back to the US and ending in back in Ethiopia.   

Hadero is leading a Social project in Africa that touches musicians in 11 countries that run along the Nile. The Nile is one of the world's great waterways. It is one of the most culturally significant natural formations in human history. Flowing northward from remote sources in the mountains of Ethiopia and central Africa and draining into the Mediterranean Sea.

Despite sharing a river, these countries do not share music.  Hadero has started the Blue Nile project to  change that. (Check out the video The Blue Nile Project ) In February of this year Hadero and her project partner Egyptian ethnomusicologist,  Mina Girgis completed a successful Kickstarter campaign for the first leg of the Nile project. They raised $11,192 for the April 2012 trip to the nile to scout for musicians for the second phase of the project.  Hadero received a Ted Senior Fellowship for this project. She will be attending four TED conferences over the next two years. She is in the company of many other inspiring fellows. The TED Fellows program brings young innovators from around the world into the TED community in order to amplify the impact of their projects and activities.

Constantly moving forward, Hadero just completed another musical project, a Ethiopian Hip-Hop Space Opera known as CopperWire’s Earthbound. The album is due to release on April 17th on Porto Franco Records. This album was a collaboration between Appsynth Media, Gabriel Teodros, Burntface, Chris Coniglio, and Hadero, with star sounds from NASA. She describes this album as a new direction in her exploration of music.

The morning after the concert I had the pleasure of interviewing the artist. In the next few weeks the video of this interview will appear on Humboldt's own Access Humboldt TV.  Eloquent and soft spoken, Hadero shared about her musical journey and the work it has taken to get to this place in her life. When I asked her what one piece of advice she had for other musicians and artists She said "Whatever you want to do in life, go hard, dont stop..."

To learn more about Meklit Hadero go to http://www.meklithadero.com/
More You tube Videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/meklithadero

Links of interest:
http://www.kickstarter.com/
http://www.ted.com/pages/fellows
WWW.COPPERWIREMUSIC.COM.
Red Poppy Art House redpoppyarthouse.org (415) 826-2402