219: Movement and Music with Meklit Hadero: A Genre-Bending Journey

My guest today is Meklit Hadero, the Ethiopian-born, San Francisco-based artist. She is best known for her innovative Ethio-Jazz vocals and electric performance style. Even if you were to listen for a few minutes, you’d notice a genre-bending nature to her songs. Her songs weave together jazz, folk, Eastern African influences, and what Meklit calls everyday sounds. She has performed worldwide, from San Francisco to Cairo to London to Montreal. Her latest, released in 2017, “When the People Move, the Music Moves Too,” was named among the best records of the year by Bandcamp and the Sunday Times UK. She is a National Geographic Explorer, a TED Senior Fellow, and a 2019 Artist-in-Residence at Harvard University. Meklit is the co-founder, co-producer, and host of Movement, a new radio series telling stories of global migration through music. In our conversation, she shares how she looks to music to express longing, pain, hope, and other facets of the diaspora. Her words reminded me of...