Bio:
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 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 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.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).