This interview was originally broadcast over the KALX airwaves on February 9, 2026.
Last Will: This is KALX Berkeley, thanks to Beast Monster Thing for allowing us this last hour. Last Will and Petro Core here. We’ll be interviewing Meklit. We’re honored to have her present here in the studio, and that’s coming right up after the first track off of her latest album, A Piece of Infinity.
Last Will: And you just heard Meklit and the first track from her latest album, A Piece of Infinity. My name’s Last Will here with Petra Core, and we are honored to have in the studio live here on 90.7 FM Freeform Radio from the University of California.
Meklit!
Meklit: Hello Hello.
Last Will: Welcome.
Meklit: I feel very welcome. How you doing?
Last Will: We’re, we’re, we’re excited and honored. I’m so, definitely, we’re so honored that
Petra Core: definitely. And I, and I, I just wanna remind everybody, the, the song we just heard was, um, Ambassel. We’re a little starstruck here this morning. But, um, Meklit, we’re, we’re very, very happy to have you here and we just thought, for starters, if you could tell us the story behind this particular album. It’s such a good one, and, uh, starting with the idea behind its name.
Meklit: Yeah, of course. Um, so the record is called A Piece of Infinity as Last Will Said, um, a few moments ago. It’s, uh, it came out late last year on Smithsonian Folkways Records and. You know, I, I am, I was born in Ethiopia. I grew up all over the states. I’ve been in the Bay Area for over 20 years. And, um, you know, I, I make music, you know, deeply inspired by Ethio Jazz, and I had this idea to make a traditional record and an album that took and reimagined, um, and, you know, put my spin on traditional Ethiopian songs. And that started, the idea for, that actually started back in 2015 when I was on tour with the Nile Project. But at the same time, like I was learning deeply, deeply about the expansiveness of Ethiopian traditional music and just how much of an infinity Ethiopian traditional music is both in terms of how many different styles and languages and cultures make up what you would call Ethiopian traditional music.
And I thought to myself, you know, I was actually, it actually came, the title itself came from a conversation with this wonderful scholar of Afrofuturism called Yatasha Womack, who is a dear friend of mine, um, and who lives in Chicago. And Yatasha and I were talking about Afrofuturism. We were having this conversation and, um.
I, I said to her, you know, what I really wouldn’t want is for someone to listen to a set of nine songs and think this is what traditional Ethiopian music is. Ethiopian traditional music is an infinity, and all I can do is point to a piece of that infinity. And I said, oh my God, I think that’s the title of the album.
And she said, girl, that’s the title of the album. And I was like, okay, that’s, so that’s how the title came about. And that’s the sentiment, you know, I wanted to be a mirror. I wanted to be an arrow to say, well, if you’re really gonna understand this music, all I can do is show you a small part of, of the expansiveness and I wanted the title to be an invitation for curiosity, to, to look more, to search deeper, um, and to, to understand how big culture is. Like whenever you put a single title on it, immediately, you know you are missing something, you are leaving something out. Like actually culture can never be, um. can never be known in a single word, in a single label. Like we have to always be looking deeper.
Petra Core: Okay. And I, I have a, a question about that, but first, for listeners who might not be familiar, can you, um, share with them a little bit about the Nile Project and, and what that, how, how that makeup influenced this album?
Meklit: Oh, sure, yeah. The Nile Project, uh, that’s a project I co-founded with an Egyptian ethnomusicologist by the name of Mina Girgis, who I believe works at UC Berkeley now, who is, um, does a bunch, uh, deep community engagement work, um, here at UC Berkeley.
And, um, Mina and I started this project in 2011 and I was involved with it until, uh, 2015. We brought together musicians from the 11 countries of the Nile Basin, which include Ethiopia and Egypt and nine other countries to collaborate musically, to learn about each other’s cultures, to create music together and really look at the intersection of culture and ecology, um, and use music as a way to model the kind of cross-cultural understanding we wanted to see at the time around resource sharing.
And you know, we spent a lot of time on the continent. Toured on the continent, toured Europe, toured the United States many times with this project, bringing musicians together from the countries of the Nile Basin. And we were asking the question like, how well do you know the people with whom you share in ecology? And how does knowing them or not knowing them influence the way that resources are shared across our ecosystems?
And um. You know, the project continued for many years without, um, without me as well. Mina continued to steward and bring that project forward. Um, and it was a beautiful, it was a beautiful experience, but being on tour with musicians from across the Nile Basin also included a lot of Ethiopian musicians, and that was a chance, that’s when I started playing Krar, the Ethiopian traditional harp
Meklit: Yes.
Last Will: We were trying to figure out how to pronounce it.
Meklit: It’s like car with an extra ‘r’, And um, and, and, and that’s when I really started learning a lot of traditional songs, you know, deeper than I had in my home. Context and culture, culture, my home cultural context. And that’s when I really learned, um, and steeped myself in the expansiveness of, of, of Ethiopian traditional music.Yeah.
Petra Core: Okay. And then one, one more question from me. Or I can keep going depending on how we,
Last Will: I think, yeah. there’s a quote here, uh, historically the Sahara was a zone of exchange, never a barrier. despite colonial histories insistence that it was.
Meklit: Yes, yes. That’s so real. And, you know, things that we would wrestle with as part of the Nile project was like, okay, we were, it’s, it’s the ecology of the river. And yet, you know, colonially, it would be divided between the Horn of Africa, east Africa, you know, and that would be Ethiopia, Eritrea, um, and then it would be East Africa, by which people would mean Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, um, and to some extent DRC Congo. And then they would say North Africa. And by that they would mean Sudan and South Sudan and Egypt. And really we were all tied by the ecology of the Nile. And so, um, you start to see that these. These labels that we give, kind of like what I was just saying about culture, like anytime you put a single word on a geography, also understand that there’s, there’s more to know about the complexity of what, what it really looks like on the ground and from the perspective of the people.
Petra Core: And it’s also just, it’s, it’s nice to think about exchanges and not, mostly pretend, um, divisions, because they, they weren’t there. They were just kind of placed on Africa as a maybe way too.
Last Will: Yeah.
Petra Core: Divide and conquer, get resources.
Last Will: We’re trying to whatever, reverse the colonial gaze and yeah. Um, um, show people from within what, uh, what the, what the history, is of, um, this, this cultural richness.
Petra Core: Mm-hmm.
Last Will: Mm-hmm. And, um, yeah. Yeah, you’ve been doing that in so many ways. And this latest album is, um. Uh, just a, a, a wonderful way to, to approach it.
Petra Core: that’s true. So, so something I wanted to, to mention because you, you kind of touched on it and, it might, you may not want to answer it, but how, when, when you mentioned the infinity, what was your process like in terms of distilling like, speaking for myself personally, if I’m, if I’m trying to pick, um, a list of favorite songs, it’s very hard for me to just choose one.. So how, how did you decide which songs ended up on, on this CD and, and which didn’t?
Meklit: yeah, no, it’s, it’s totally fine to answer that question because an album inevitably involves choices, right? Like, you, you can’t, you, you can’t put, you know, 150 songs on an album. That doesn’t work. That’s, that’s a playlist, not a album.
Petra Core: Right.
Meklit: Um, so. You know, it was, it was a process and I was very grateful to be able to work with Women’s Audio Mission in San Francisco, the only studio in the world entirely built and run by women and Women’s Audio Mission. Terry from Women’s Audio Mission came to me and she said. Hey, you know, there’s an opportunity for a traditional, cultural project, a grant from the Creative Work Fund, which is now the Creative Power Awards, but it was the Creative work fund then. And she said, do you wanna apply together? And so we did for this record.
And so we had to, you have to come up with a process and you sort of have to make a process where whatever happens from the process, you will trust that the diligence is done along the way. So what I did was I enlisted a lot of advisors, um. My pianist and keyboardist, his name is Kibrom Birhane, he lives in Los Angeles, but tours with me a lot.
Um, he was one of my, you know, very profound musical advisors. Um, and he brought me about 50 songs to consider. And then you just listen and see which ones flow to the top, you know, of like in the, in some ways the songs choose you. You know, you have to say, which songs will not let me go? Which songs will, which songs, you know, come into my mind and won’t leave me alone.
They knock on your door, they tap on your shoulder, you know, so there’s that. Um. I also worked with an artist called Teferi Assefa, who actually passed a couple of years ago. He was a percussionist based in Addis Ababa, who himself was an ethnographer. He was not traditionally you know, trained as an ethnomusicologist or an ethnographer, but he was, that he would go around Ethiopia and record music, um, and tribes and ethnicities that had never been recorded before.
And so he had this deep, deep knowledge. And, and even amongst, you know, aside from that, um, really groundbreaking work that he did in Ethiopia, he was just deeply, deeply connected with traditional musicians there, and so I worked with him as an advisor as well. Um. And then of course my parents, you know, and my father was a big part of this journey of choosing songs.
And inevitably you get to a place where you have to make choices. And those choices are about, okay, we have this much time in the studio. How many songs can we do? Okay, we have, you know, um, we have this much, we have to have at least this many songs to make the record, you know, feels substantial. Here’s the amount of, you know, okay, we can’t get to two vinyls. So how much music can fit on one vinyl? I mean, it’s like a mix of logistical questions and operational questions, and then creative questions and then, and then just spiritual questions. You know, which of the songs that that are telling you they want to be expressed through you and to me that’s about that, what I was saying earlier, like which songs just won’t let you go.
Petra Core: Sure. Well, speaking of your album, a Piece of Infinity, um, I think we’re going to take a listen soon to Geefata. Can you introduce that to the audience.
Meklit: Yeah! Geefata is such a special song. Um, it’s a song from my father’s place, Kembata. And you know, my mother grew up singing a lot in the house. And so, like, um, Ambassel, for example, was a song that she was always singing in the house. And, um, that was part of reason and that was in,
Petra Core: and that was in Amharic?
Meklit: Yes, and that was part of the reason why I wanted to include that on the record. That was a song that wouldn’t let me go. And, um. But on Geefata, my father didn’t really bring the traditional music of Kembata to the house, but so I, you know, many, many years ago, I, um. I founded a collective of Ethiopian diaspora artists of many disciplines, and we would go to Ethiopia to connect with traditional and contemporary culture bearers there. And we tried to go to a festival called The Festival of a Thousand Stars in 2009. The festival was actually canceled. We still went, but um, I never forgot that name, the Festival of a Thousand Stars. And I knew that a group from Kembata had performed there. So when I was getting ready to do this record, I thought, you know, I’m gonna go back and listen to that festival. And I, there was a SoundCloud recording of, um, the festival from 2008. It was three days long, three days of recordings.
Petra Core: Wow.
Meklit: And I’d listened minute by minute through the whole thing until I came to the group from Kembata and they were singing a song called Geefata. And so I brought it to my dad and I said, okay, well what is this? What is this song? And he just kind of stopped in his tracks and he said, Meklit, this is the song.
THE song, this is the song that was always present when I was growing up there. It was always a part of any celebration. Geefata was there, you know, a baby is born, a successful hunt, a a holiday, always there was Geefata. And I said, okay, well this, I’m gonna bring this song to the record.
Petra Core: Wow.
Last Will: So who are the musicians on here and talk about, um how you, how you decided to arrange, uh, your version of this song.
Meklit: So it was really, this one was maybe the toughest arrangement. Um, and, or well, it was, it was certainly one of them because the version that we had was just drums and voice. It was a group, you know, playing drums and there was a lead singer and then the chorus of, of responders.
And so there was just so much openness and they’re doing a lot. Then you’re listening to, okay, well they’re okay. They’re, they’re using a major pentatonic scale. Okay, we’re gonna use a major pentatonic scale, but everything else, the baseline, the, you know, the piano parts, the horn parts, everything else. Um, I built and, um, arranged and usually I, I just arranged layer by layer, typically starting with bass, and then also worked with my longtime arranger and the co-producer of this record, Sam Bevan. Um, we’ve played together now, let’s see, we started playing together in the very last days of 2012. Um, he’s been to Ethiopia with me, somebody I really trust deeply, so we work together on the arrangement.
Um, the musicians are Sam Bevan on the electric bass. Colin Douglas on the drum kit, Marco Peris Coppola on, um, percussion. Howard Wiley on saxophone, um, tenor and oh yes. Oh yes. Many snaps for Mr. Wiley, um, on tenor saxophone. And bari [baritone] we did layers on saxophone and he actually did some electronics on this one. And keyboard. Mm-hmm. Alright. And me.
Last Will: Alright. So. Last Will and Petra Core interviewing the wonderful Meklit. We are featuring her new album, A Piece of Infinity, and talking with her about what’s going on now and coming up in the future. And from that album, we’re going to hear Geefata.
Musical Excerpt
Last Will: All right, we are back with, um, Meklit. Last Will and Petra Core here talking to Meklit, and uh,
Petra Core: and that was Geefata? Yeah. Off of a Piece of Infinity, Meklit’s newest album from September, 2025. Mm-hmm.
Last Will: Yeah. Um, and so you were talking about, uh, the, um, local, um, reed player, Howard Wiley. Who’s, uh, um, you know, when I, when I hear him especially on that, honking on that saxophone, I think of, Getatchew Mekurya the legendary Ethiopia saxophonist. Um, and yeah, talk, talk about your working with him and even on this latest album and, and in other, uh, other iterations like live and, and so forth.
Meklit: Yeah. Yeah. You know. Howard is someone who is always channeling something bigger. You know, like he’s, he, he never touches the horn without an energy in the room changing, you know, and that’s what I love about Howard. He’s really a, he’s someone who. You’re at rehearsal, he’s gonna bring it. You’re at soundcheck, he’s gonna bring it. You’re the show. He is like, there’s no time when you play halfway.
Petra Core: Wow.
Meklit: And that’s really important because whether it’s a rehearsal, like you’re, you’re not playing like deeply, you know, powerful ancestral lineage in a show and not in rehearsal, like you’re always doing it. So you always have to bring, you always have to bring that. So Howard has that and then. Mm. You know, we, my first show ever with Howard was actually like in 2009. It was a long time ago, but we seriously started working together 10 years ago in 2016.
And, um, when it came time to work with Howard, I was like, okay, Howard, you, what you have to do is like, yes, you have to listen to Getatchew Mekurya and, and the Ethiopian, um, saxophonists from the seventies and beyond. And you gotta listen to the traditional flute players because like when these styles are being innovated on the saxophone, like how do you bring this music to kind of, you know, a place where it can breathe in the same kind of timbres, you know, as jazz music, you’re gonna, you, you still have to link to like.
You, you gotta find a way, a path. So I was like, Howard, what you gotta do is you just listen to the flute player. So I just made a playlist of flute, Ethiopian flute music Washint and um. And he did it. He really, really, really listened. And, and then Kibrom Birhane who I mentioned earlier, my long time keyboard pianist, and he’s a multi-instrumentalist as well. Like, he’s also kind of a, I would say he’s kind of the guide of the whole band, so.
Petra Core: Wow. Okay.
Meklit: So everybody, like everybody goes to him and, you know, um, when, when, when the band has questions that they, you know, that they need kind of refining on also, Kibrom is a great resource for that.
Petra Core: Okay. And, and speaking of, um, of instruments, I, can you talk a little bit about some of the other traditional instruments that are on this album, like you, you touched on the Krar? I think there, there is a washint right?
Meklit: There is not, there is not. The krar is the only traditional uh, the traditional instrument on the record. And it’s played. I play it on the song Stars in a Wide Field and Kibrom plays it on the last song on the record. Um, and you know, I, I. I’ve, but I’ve featured traditional instruments over many years in different ways. Like, uh, the washint is all over my 2017 record, When the People move, the Music Moves Too. As is masenqo. Oh, the single string fiddle. Um, okay.
Petra Core: Yeah. So Camille Thurman who plays the flute on My Gold
Meklit: Yes.
Petra Core: On My Gold is, is playing probably her flute?
Meklit: She’s playing her flute. Oh yes. She’s playing the western flute. Yeah. It’s a whole different technique today. Yeah.
Last Will: And talk about your, your vocal range. I, I was talking off mic and you know, where I’m from being able to appreciate you is, is, is, you know, the, the, uh, touchstones or what, what do you want? What do you want from Mc Clete? Do you want, uh, um, Minnie Riperton? You got it. You want Millie Jackson? You got it. Anything in between you, you just. You’re just a amazing singer.
Petra Core: it’s true.
Last Will: Where, I read that, uh, you know, your mother said you started singing, you came out of the womb a singer, like when you were a tiny. You were going around asking people, do you wanna hear me sing my ABCs on the bus, right? Yes.
Petra Core: Do you remember that?
Meklit: Um, I remember, I don’t have a memory of the, of the quote unquote bus incident. Um, that’s
Last Will: one of those annoying things interviews do where I, you know, I read somewhere where you did it and it’s like,
Meklit: no, those are precious. Those are precious memories. Those are, I, what I remember is just. Just having, always having a sense that music was important to me. Mm-hmm. Like I would be. You know, like even just the radio thing, still to this day, if I hear like a Prince song or a Michael Jackson song from like 1990, like I know I can sing every instrument’s part. Like I, I wasn’t, I knew all the lyrics, I knew all the vocal improvisations, I knew the guitar parts. I would memorize guitar solos, like I would sing them back. It’s um. It’s just something that I just always loved music, and I loved expressing myself musically. And you know, it was just something where I always knew how important it was for me to do it for my own wellbeing.
You know? And I always wanted to be a singer, but, you know, becoming, it’s, it’s actually, you eventually realize that to become a singer, you sing. Like, it’s, it’s actually very, very direct, you know? Um. And I actually have a new vocal teacher.
Petra Core: Oh,
Meklit: mm-hmm. And it’s, and his
Last Will: What are you teaching them?
Meklit: Oh, no, everybody has, everybody can always learn. It’s actually this really interesting technique called body-based voice. And it’s all about, it’s almost like a mindfulness practice of like, where do you feel tension, you know, where the left side and the right side of your um, kind of body axis feeling different. Are you connected to the ground? It’s like really about Feldenkrais technique and I’m forgetting the other one. Um,
Petra Core: it sounds very organic.
Meklit: It’s incredibly organic and really about connecting you to yourself and your own instrument. And it’s not about a particular, it’s not about a particular like sound. It’s not making you sound like. Anything. It’s about understanding how much the, the voice is about the physical body and muscle tension and all of these things. And so I’m finding it incredibly freeing. So, you know, everybody has places to learn and grow and I still love to learn. I, I, I learn every day
Petra Core: Well, your, your voice sounds like an instrument. Seriously. Thank you. It just, it’s, thank you. It’s, it’s, it’s beautiful. And, and speaking of that, um. While Last Will is queuing up the song that I think we’re gonna hear next, which is different ’cause I changed my mind. I’m sorry, this is really hard. If Meklit, if you could speak a little bit about the last track on this album, Lefeqer Enegeza.
Petra Core: Thank you. You do it better than me. This is another, um, song that is sung on Amharic, right?
Meklit: Yes, yes. And this is a song. So there’s a wonderful poet by the name of Alemtsehay Wedajo and she’s somebody who, you know, people in Ethiopia will recognize her and her. She’s, um, a poet who’s written hit songs, the lyrics for hit songs, for pretty much every classic Ethiopian singer you can imagine.
She is also just incredibly multi-talented. She was the first woman director of the Ethiopian National Theater. She’s a playwright. She’s an actress. She has run for over 25 years that Tayitu Cultural Center in Washington, DC um, in Silver Spring, Maryland, actually the DMV [DC/Maryland/Virginia] area and she tours. She writes, plays and tours them internationally.
She is like a legend of Ethiopian culture and she’s one of these people who it’s like she was doing what she was doing as a woman. Like before that was really even possible for women. She was doing it, in, in the, you know, in the confines of, um. Okay. You know, uh, what equality was and could be in Ethiopia.
Petra Core: Yeah.
Meklit: And she’s really a trailblazer. And so, um, we got connected in, I don’t remember when, maybe 2019. And she agreed to write these lyrics for me. And so, and then I arranged it with Kibrom Birhane and Sam Bevin and the song, LeFeqer Enegeza, it’s, it’s, uh, a love song and, um, Let’s Surrender to Love. That’s kind of the translation, you know, it’s always hard to translate things, but it’s a really, really beautiful lyrically so this was my chance to work with her.
Last Will: Great. So we are,
Petra Core: Nice, it’s a lovely song,
Last Will: We are happily surrendering the airwaves to Meklit here on 90.7 FM UC Berkeley sponsored and Freeform Community Radio with Last Will and Petra Core
Petra Core: and Meklit!
Musical Excerpt
Last Will: And there you have it from Meklit’s, uh, latest album.
Petra Core: And, um, something that that comes to mind, because I realized that this wasn’t exactly intentional, but I think we played kind of the song in the middle in addition to the first and the last song. And I’m curious if you when you were putting these songs in order, can you talk a little bit about like what made you choose the first and the last song and the one in the middle?
Meklit: Yeah, well, that, that last song, LeFeqer Enegeza, to me, feels like. Uh, closing a book, you know, it, it does feel like I’m sending you off in a dream. Um, and Ambassel for me, just starting with that kind of wall of sound? Um, the record just feels like, oh, hey, you’re in a, you’re in, you’re in the world of this record now. Choosing songs or choosing song order is not my favorite part of the album process.
Petra Core: Yeah,
Meklit: because it’s a lot of like, you put it in order, you, you put it in what you think, and then you listen to the beginnings of songs and the ends of songs and you see how it flows. You have to kind of think like a DJ. As you all are, you know, so expert at doing and just see, see what kind of story you’re bringing people through. It’s kind of like a set list, which is also not my favorite, like set lists.
Last Will: That was gonna, I was gonna ask, compare that to picking a set list. Right. And also, um, when’s the next time we’re gonna be able to see you perform live?
Meklit: Oh, I just did the record release at the Freight A couple of weeks ago.
Last Will: Yeah.
Meklit: Um, so set lists for me, I put them together. There’s kind of like the album process. It’s a mix of operations and kind of, you know, um, a storytelling intention or like a creative intention. So there are certain songs that have the upright bass and certain songs that have the electric bass.
So one thing you have to do is group the upright bass songs and group the electric bass songs so that there’s not a lot of change over, you know, you’re thinking about flow. I like to start big and then go have a couple of big songs and then take you down and then build it back up. But what I’ve also noticed about set lists lately is that I really deviate from them.
I just, I just am really, I’m like, okay, here’s the set list and then the band knows that I’m just gonna pick. You know, be like, oh, because, ’cause you also are. You know, being also from a jazz tradition, like I’m improvising, I’m reading the room, I’m like, what do people need in this moment? Like, oh, this song doesn’t feel right. We’re not ready for this kind of emotional intensity of this next song. We need, uh, a kind of light tune before we can get to that other tune. So I’ll just, I’ll, I’ll set a framework and then feel my way through. Yeah, which you can’t do on a record. On a record you have to commit.
Petra Core: Right, right. Well, A Piece of Infinity on Smithsonian Folkways has a total of nine songs and they’re all like, just incredible.
Meklit: Thank you. Thank you.
Petra Core: But before we start wrapping up the interview, I do wanna touch on, um, a couple of other projects. You seem to have a lot of projects that you work on actually, but in particular the Immigrant Movement Orchestra.
Meklit: Yeah.
Petra Core: Can you share with the listeners a a little bit about what, what that is and how it came together?
Meklit: Yeah. It’s, it’s part of a larger project about music and migration. So we have a podcast, um, which has been going on for three years,
Petra Core: and that’s called Movement.
Meklit: And that’s Movement with Meklit Hadero and we have three seasons of that. Um, we actually started in 2017, but it just took us a long time to find the right partners and um, and we were doing that and I was just loving interviewing immigrant musicians and uplifting the songs and stories of immigrant musicians, but it was also all very virtual. You know, I was talking to people on Zoom and the production team was all over the country, and that was a blessing during the pandemic, but at some point, I was like, okay, we need things in person in the Bay Area. Um, number one, because I just needed to feel the community more, I also needed to feel the joy of being together.
And so we started a series of gatherings of immigrant musicians and right away what I noticed is that people wanted to be together and they wanted to play music together. And so we would have these, you know, Sunday gatherings and the jam session would start like 20 minutes in, you know? Okay. And it would go for like two or three hours and people, and we would have musicians from, you know, Iran, and Mali and Mexico, and Ethiopia and Spain and Italy and um, Brazil and just folks just wanted to be together and play together.
So we were like, okay. We’re onto something. We started having more gatherings and then, um, my partner Marco and I, we were like, what would be fun? Like, what is the fun extension of this? People wanna be together. They wanna play together. Let’s make this into something where we can really express our solidarity, our solidarity of immigrants being there for each other.
And have a way to kind of center our cultural power, our resilience, um, deepen and develop the networks across immigrant communities, which can be siloed by race and ethnicity, um, and kind of organizing practices. You know, let’s make more pathway for solidarity. And this all started in 2023. And then we had our first performance of the immigrant orchestra in 2024.
It’s been a wonderful experience because, you know, we take turns being in a leadership and being in a support position. And what that means is that there’s no musical director. But Marco and I are holding the wholeness, right? Like, everybody can’t come to us and be like, okay, I’m gonna have a really, uh, I’m gonna do a tear jerker song.
Like, it doesn’t work that way. Like, or, or we wanna express a range. And so we work with the artists and folks who are a part of it include, like Diana Gameros, who is a wonderful, formerly undocumented, um, Mexican singer songwriter. There’s, um, Safa Shokrai who’s an Iranian bass player. Um, Rosie Eve, who is a cellist, pianist, multi-instrumentalist from Taiwan, uh, Prasant Radhakrishnan, beautiful Carnatic, south Indian classical saxophonist.
And we all, and, and many more. And you know, and then the process of creating this sound together is about also, uh, a way that we can build this practice of being there for each other, and supporting each other, especially in these times when immigrants are being, you know, vilified and attacked more than ever. And it’s, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a scary time. It’s a time when we need to remember our cultural power and have pathways and structures for that, structures and strategies for that to remain, you know, strong and, um, telling our stories on our own terms. And, and that’s what the Immigrant Orchestra is about. And that’s what, the um, the podcast movement with Meklit Hadero is about.
Petra Core: Thank you so much. It’s, it’s really important work that you’re doing. So, um, when, when listeners want to find out more about, um, any of this, can you provide your website?
Meklit: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, for the podcast, anywhere you, you can listen to your podcasts: It’s movement with Meklit Hadero M-E-K-L-I-T. My website is meklitmusic.com. That’s also my handle on all socials. Um, the, the website for the project as a whole is Movementstories.com. And, you know, even if you forget my name and you’re like, what was that person’s name, you can just google Ethiopian singer San Francisco and I come right up.
Petra Core: Alright. Are, are we going to go out with one more song from the album?
Last Will: Yes. I was thinking to, um, nurture Infinity, nurturing the children is certainly an important way to do it. And so talk about Stars in a Wide Field. Uh, which was written based on translations of traditional Kembata children’s riddles. And, and your own dreams.
Meklit: Yes. You know, my, so this one is so special as part of this journey that I went on with my dad and Geefata and the song we played earlier. My father also told me about this tradition of children’s riddles in Kembata where he grew up and children would do riddle battles and they would know thousands of riddles and, or some would know thousands of riddles.
But there are many, many, many of them. And so he sent me translations of these riddles and they were so incredible. I was like, this is what children do? It was so genius and brilliant, it would be like, what is the water that you don’t drink? And the answer would be tears. Oh, what is a bed that cannot walk?
Sorry. What is an ox that cannot walk? And an answer would be your, your bed.
Petra Core: Okay.
Meklit: And what is the mother’s mat that cannot be rolled up? And the answer is the sky. So you just, you see this, you, it’s just a, a window into this cosmology, a way of understanding the world.
Petra Core: Poetic.
Meklit: It’s so poetic, and the one that just put chills in my body was, what is the roasted grain strewn in a wide field? And the answer was the stars. And you just see a way into a world, into a cosmology. And then I was also thinking just about the, just the power of culture and staying connected to culture. And I was also inspired by a line spoken by the great civil rights icon and cultural icon, Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, which, um, inspired a line in this as well, which she said, ‘When we sing, we announce our existence.’ Oh, that’s beautiful. And I never got over that line. And, and so worked with a part of that line in this song as well. And this is Stars In A Wide Field.
Petra Core: Wonderful.
musical excerpt
Meklit: This is Meklit. You are listening to KALX Berkeley. And the next song is Y’shebellu by Aster Aweke.
Last Will: Thanks for coming in Meklit. And Last Will and Petco signing off. Stay tuned for Rare Earth.
Petra Core: Thank you so much.
Meklit: Thank you.
