Meklit Honors the Diversity of Ethiopian Folk Music on ‘A Piece of Infinity’

The way Meklit sees it, “we don’t have to forget the power of culture to be modern people.” It’s an assertion that serves as a pillar for the Ethiopian singer’s efforts, particularly on her new album, A Piece of Infinity. Featuring performances of six traditional songs, the 9-track project draws from the infinite tapestry of Ethiopian folk music, with lush arrangements adding Meklit’s own touch of jazz-infused alchemy to the evergreen, rustic charm of these songs.

Initially conceived a decade ago, the self-produced album is a statement of how Meklit’s ideals have evolved over the years, greatly assisted by definitive encounters and conversations. In 2009, Meklit went to see the late, great Kenyan literary giant Ngugi Wa Thiong’o speak, and it turned out to be transformative.

“He said, some British photographer went to South Africa in the year 1910 and took a picture of a Zulu warrior, and that picture goes in the British Museum, everyone points to that picture and says, ‘This is what a Zulu warrior dresses like.’ Then he said, ‘How do you know that was not just the latest fashion?’ He said there is no such thing as anthropological Africa, culture is always evolving through the genius creativity of Africans, and we can’t put things in amber and say this is what it is because culture is not a museum, it’s living.”

A few years later, Mulatu Astatke, widely considered the godfather of Ethiopian jazz, pulled Meklit aside after she performed at a show in Addis Ababa. “He looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Meklit, it’s your jazz, you cannot play it like we played it 50 years ago. You have to find your contribution and keep innovating.’ He said the music cannot remain stuck, it has a place to go, to live and breathe and grow.” This was just after Meklit released her debut album, On A Day Like This…, which was heavily reliant on the classic ideals of Ethio-jazz and included a cover of the jazz standard, “Feeling Good.”

In 2011, Meklit co-founded the Nile Project, an ensemble of musicians from 11 African countries through which the Nile River passes. Alongside co-founder, the Egyptian ethnomusicologist Mina Girgis, they toured extensively across Africa, Europe, and the U.S. “It was like being in a school of the music of the Nile River as a whole, from Rwanda to Sudan to Egypt,” she tells OkayAfrica. “There were four traditional Ethiopian musicians on the tour, and that’s when I learned to play krar, the Ethiopian traditional harp. I had never [been with] traditional musicians day in, day out for months, and I just started to feel the universe of sound of Ethiopian music — also of African music — and it was so, so deep.”

That depth is evident immediately A Piece of Infinity starts, as Meklit’s siren voice trills through the opening melodies of the traditional Amharic love song, “Ambassel,” wringing out her own meaning to a song that has existed for many, many decades. On “Dale Shura,” an Oromo prayer song for rain, the singer’s reverence for nature is almost touchable, her wispy melodies wafting over upright bass and sauntering drums.

The songs on the album were selected in conjunction with collaborators and mentors, including the accomplished Ethio-jazz pianist Kibrom Birhane, who plays extensively across the project, and iconic Ethiopian drummer Teferi Assefa, who passed away earlier this year. The album closer and one of the original songs, “Lefeqer Enegeza,” was written by Alemtsehay Wedajo, the revered poet, playwright, and director, who’s written for all your favorite Ethiopian artists.”

Meklit also credits her father, Ayele Hadero, particularly for helping out with the jaunty, swing track “Geefata.” The Hadero family had fled Ethiopia back in 1974, during the height of the armed conflict that followed the revolution that had ousted Emperor Haile Selassie. Meklit was raised between Iowa and Brooklyn, and lived in twelve cities across three continents, but her family kept her rooted to Ethiopian culture, from her mum humming traditional songs to her dad’s assistance on this album.

“The way I found ‘Geefata’ was, I knew a traditional group from Kembata had gone to a festival in 2008 that was recorded, some random person put that festival up on SoundCloud, and I went minute by minute through that festival until I found the group and I listened to their set,” Meklit shares. She went through 70 hours of recording to find “Geefata,” a communal celebration song from Kembata, where her father was born and raised. Along with help from Kembata elders, the singer’s father assisted in the learning and translation process of making the song.

A Piece of Infinity is a product of deliberateness in a way that makes the spirituality of folk music deeply engrossing. It’s perhaps most evident on the lead single, “Tizita,” one of the most storied and treasured song forms in the Ethiopian folk canon, which immortalizes lost loves and lives.

“Tizita for me is so deep that I feel it in my feet and in my bones, and the reason is that it’s so much a part of me,” the San Francisco-based artist says. “This is one of the songs my mother used to hum around the house. It’s very much about the environment that I grew up in, songs of longing and nostalgia, but it’s also something about the way that people love. They’re always with you, one melody away. There are many different versions, and everybody does it a little differently — everybody has their Tizita, and it’s because you feel the way that they bend it to their own life.”

Meklit adds that when she sings the Tizita live, “I feel the millions of voices that have sung the Tizita and how the love of millions of people has poured into those lyrics, and this is the power of folk music for me. That’s why I called the album A Piece of Infinity, to honor the massive diversity of Ethiopian music I’m hoping to be one part of and because millions of people have loved these songs, have sung these songs, have used them to express their life and to share the love that’s in their hearts, in their own life.”

Despite the explicit cultural weight of folk music, especially within the context of Afrobeats and other forms of popular African music nearly homogenizing listeners’ attention, Meklit says she views culture as a continuum and not a binary, emphasizing that there’s no need for boxes. As an example, she says if anyone goes to a Beyoncé concert, “you might also feel that she’s channeling deep-rooted folk music, just in a different way.”

For Meklit, who’ll be performing at this year’s BRIC jazz festival in New York in mid-October, her emphasis on live performance is par for the course for an artist who sees the medium as the truest expression and experience of music.

“This is the cycle: An artist sings as a way to express a feeling, there’s a message inside the feeling, and the message has a resonance once the listener catches it live,” she says. “You may not want to get it. You may not even come with an open mind or open heart, but you will receive something. This is what the power of music is.”