Y Spy: Meklit Hadero

Meklit Hadero sounds like a lot of things: a full-throated jazz pixie, a guitar folk whisperer, a cool and self-collected slinger of R&B.  One thing she never sounds is boring, and I’d also throw in complacent into that mess of things Hadero is not.  A lifelong traveler, the Ethiopian-born singer has collected a vast swath of styles, mixing them together into “On a Day like This,” an album released last year in which Hadero sings of setting roots in San Francisco.

            But in talking with Meklit Hadero, one gets the strong impression that her musical ambitions – goals which are blatantly larger than sound – don’t begin and end with the recording of songs.  Having formed an artistic group of fellow Ethiopians known as the Arba Minch Collective, Hadero has explored and challenged her roots with an intensity that is hard to match.

 

Y Spy:  Let’s start with the basics.  Who are you, and what is your musical background?

 

Meklit Hadero:  I’m a vocalist and a songwriter originally from Ethiopia.  I was born there and grew up all over the States: in Brooklyn and in Florida and in Seattle.  I’ve been in San Francisco the past seven years.  The music kind of sits at the crossroads of three different traditions: the American songwriters, jazz, as well as bringing in some Ethiopian music and influence.  I primarily play with jazz instruments, plus I bring a lot of improvisation into the live shows.

 

Y Spy:  How has traveling around internationally as well as within the United States affected your musical perspective?

 

Hadero:  When people ask me what my influences are, I tend to think less about who are the artists that I model myself after and more about what the sounds are that I’ve absorbed growing up.  For example, living in Brooklyn for six years, the place I grew up in my childhood years, jazz was everywhere.  It was in the subways and in the streets.  So was early hip-hop.  That sort of soundscape, the streetscape, of New York felt like it was an important sonic ingredient.  Then, of course, growing up and having my parents play old Ethiopian cassettes.

There was a constancy of sound as a presence in one’s life, and how those sounds then get interpreted as songs, and where they come out, is something of a mystery.  But it does happen, and that was a big part of how I developed this particular approach to making music.

In terms of influences, though, I’d say that my biggest influences have been my voice teachers, people who taught me what the voice is and what its expressive power as an instrument is.

 

Y Spy:  How did you put together On a Day like This?

 

Hadero:  I wanted to make it as a tribute to my first five years in San Francisco, because at the time I wasn’t sure I was going to stay.  I had just done a residency at the De Young Museum and was about to go to Oxford for a few weeks to do the TED Global Fellowship, and then I was going to travel for three months.  I called it my cliff; I had no idea what was going to happen after this particular period of time.

It was just about two months before I left when I said: I have to make an album before I leave.  I realized that I wanted to capture the period of time that had happened.  So it was really about who I had been playing with for those five years of developing those songs, bringing together all these jazz musicians who I had played with and who were a big part of my musical community, but also bringing together a lot of musicians from a collective of classical artists called Classical Revolution that are all about changing the way classical is played, making it more accessible.  They have chapters in ten or twelve cities, but they started in San Francisco a few blocks from my creative home at the Red Poppy Art House.  That’s how I brought people together.

 

Y Spy:  As you’ve said, On a Day like This mixes together a lot of styles.  Was it difficult, considering this, to constrain all of these different directions to something as finite as an album?

 

Hadero:  I have real faith in multiplicity.  I feel like people have a lot of capacity for bringing together complexity than is offered in a lot of marketing.  Nobody’s really one genre.  It’s really hard to label anyone’s music.  The best descriptions of music are poetic.

I never thought of it as limiting; I thought of it as a window.

 

Y Spy:  Were there any styles that you do wish you had explored more on this album, or that you would like to explore more on a future release?

 

Hadero:  I have a few releases coming out.  I’m actually in the middle of two albums right now.  Gabriel Teodros is a Seattle-based MC who, with Burntface and I, went to Ethiopia in May as part of this collective that travels there annually to connect with artists, traditional and contemporary.  We just finished recording an album which we call our Ethiopian hip-hop space opera.  So I’m working with two MCs, and it’s all with beats, and in it Gabriel is a half-alien, half-human coming to Earth for the first time.  It’s a really theatrical, big production, and that will be out in January.

Also in January is a simultaneous release with an Oakland-based soul singer called Quinn Deveaux.  We’re doing soul interpretations of indie rock and art rock songs, with a few originals on there too.  Some David Byrne and Patti Smith, but really bringing the soul roots of that music to light through this collaboration.

I’ll continue to make the music that is interesting and inspiring to me, but I really don’t feel limited by style.  Collaboration lets you grow in that way.

 

Y Spy:  It seemed that in the old top-down musical model, musicians would release work every two years or so, but there wasn’t a whole lot of recording or outside activity inbetween.  Do you feel like people are becoming more open to collaboration now, being that the terms aren’t so dictated from the top?

 

Hadero:  That’s exactly what it is: the terms aren’t dictated from the top.  We’re also in a place where nobody knows what works, so there are no rules.  You might get pressures from all sorts of sides to be more defined and hyper-focused in your scope, but now nobody knows.  So try something!

Part of what makes me empowered is my relationship with Porto Franco Records, the label I work with.  They’re based in San Francisco, a father-son team, and they are ridiculously supportive.  They’ve helped me make these records, and they really believe in their artists – and I think they believe in artists in general.  That’s been a relationship that has made a lot of this possible.

 

Y Spy:  What do your recent touring plans look like?

 

Hadero:  As I mentioned, we were in Ethiopia and Kenya in May.  I’ve been doing some summer touring; this particular tour starts in the Bay Area and winds all the way up the West Coast.  I’m doing an East Coast tour in October, hopefully heading to Europe in November.  But right now, aside from these short tours, I’m trying to finish up these albums and gear up for January.  2012 is going to be really tour intensive.

 

Y Spy:  How did you go about gathering fellow Ethiopian musicians to form the Arba Minch Collective?  Were these people you already knew or people you sought out?

 

Hadero:  Kind of both.  There was a website called habesha.com that came out in 2001.  It started as a website to bring together Ethiopian-American and Eritrean-American artists.  It was at the height of the tensions between Ethiopia and Eritrea.  What they ended up doing was bringing together and finding Ethiopian-Americans, Ethiopian-Canadians, Eritreans, and artists in diaspora.  They started writing about them, they started compiling lists, and suddenly there was a place where you could find out what all these people were doing all over the world.  It kind of underlined this emerging generation.  On Myspace you started finding out about people, and then there started being conferences where people would get together.

This network of artists who were doing work that I really loved, that I had been paying attention to for quite a while, I started meeting them when I started performing a lot.  There was an awareness, you would say.  What happened was that I found out about something called the 1,000 Stars Festival that brought together 56 ethnic groups from the south of Ethiopia to play their music together.  They’re distinct ethnic groups with different cultures, different music, different food even, and they came together in this festival and danced and sang for three days, for 50,000 people from Ethiopia.  I thought: I had to go, but how much more powerful would it be if it wasn’t just me that goes, but a whole generation that’s in this process of defining itself and could really benefit and learn from going to this?  So the group started for a particular experience.  The festival was cancelled, and we went anyway and had an amazing time traveling throughout the country and connecting with a burgeoning artistic movement.  Our first trip was in December 2009, and our second trip was this past May, and we will continue to make annual trips.

 

Y Spy:  In America, culture seems relatively formless and changing, taking connections for granted.  What is the importance to you of having these connections with artists from your homeland?

 

Hadero:  In a way, it’s about reality.  What I realized is that, growing up in the States, my whole experience of Ethiopian culture was filtered through my family lens.  There were the stories that I would hear, experiences that particular people would have, but that’s such a small part of this grand picture of culture.  What I realized is that things are changing there, fast.  They’re changing extremely fast.  Every time I go to Ethiopia, it looks different.  Infrastructure is growing so fast, and I think it’s also in a process where there are huge pressures happening, too.  If I really wanted to understand what was happening, I couldn’t rely on these filters.  I’d have to go, but I had to go again, and again, and again, in order to have an accurate picture.  If I ask myself why, my tendency is to answer with almost intuition – because I have to know, because I have to learn.

 

Y Spy:  How does that compare with the artistic connections and your perspectives about and with America?

 

Hadero:  I read in the New York Times, ten years ago, that 70 percent of New Yorkers are foreign born.  That blew my mind!  For me growing up there, that was the norm.  Diaspora was the norm.  I know it’s not like that all over, and borders are real, and contested, and challenging.  But we also live in a place of multiplicity, and we can’t deny that.  That’s what the world is like, and if we want to prepare ourselves for interacting with the whole world, we kind of have to be a little bit curious.  And music reflects your times.

 

 

Meklit Hadero will play the EMP Level 3 Stage at Seattle’s Bumbershoot Festival at 9 pm on Saturday, September 3rd.  Her album, “On a Day like This,” is available now.

August 31, 2011
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Y Marks the Spot: The Big, Terrible Silence

A whole lot of awesome nothing.

I don’t adapt quickly, but I do adapt brilliantly.  I act with the speed of an ice age.  My process of learning involves a lot of trial and error, a lot of intellectual probing and catastrophic screwing up before I figure out the scheme, and then, poof, I’m a half-assed expert.  I come into the game with everyone around me convinced that I’m the dumbest creature to ever evolve thumbs, but when I’ve hit my stride I suddenly become a sullen, sarcastic, shambling shade of gold.

So it’s not surprising to me that, one month to the day since I traded in extreme social claustrophobia for wonderful, titanic freedom, I still haven’t adjusted.

The night that I moved into my new place and joined Clarence Clemons’ band, I was too overwhelmed to think.  I paced around the planks of my big, beautiful, empty rooms, amazed that things had worked out so wonderfully.  But I couldn’t sit down.  I couldn’t stop thinking about things I wanted to get for the place and how I wanted to arrange the furniture.  The past year of living in paranoia without any sort of permanent, sealable sanctuary had wound me up to the point where, once a place of silence finally swooped in and presented itself, I reacted with something resembling horror, becoming a poster boy for antisocial shell shock.

The plan on that first night was that my girlfriend and I would eat pizza and get drunk on screwdrivers – a luxury that I now, in all my total heavenly glory, can once more afford.  Only the food happened, and then we sat, both stunned by the new, scary quiet.  Sleep – another luxury that I can once again afford – happened, eventually, but we did not ride in triumph to it like Wagnerian Valkyries.  Instead, we slithered into it like sluggish mud men.  Anticipation, as usual, disappointed.

A month later, I still feel like I’m living in a state of shock.  The big spaces are being filled out; the place feels less like a void and more like a nouveau riche dwelling of some insipid Ikea socialite or Wal-Martian dignitary.  I live like a normal person.  I have the den I’ve always wanted, my folding card table desk and lawn chair recliner ready to accommodate my every bargain basement philosopher-king whim.  Yet I feel like I’m still waiting for some big fireworks display to happen before I crank the bolt off the fire hydrant in my brain and let the brain-kids dance around in its street corner flood.  There’s still terror, and indecision, and intimidation, and solitary agoraphobia.  I’m still waiting, and the time for waiting has passed.

In the meantime, I’ve been junkie-devouring all the meager distractions that I’ve brought into this Spartan villa.  There’s no more cable TV.  No internet.  No friends.  We watch cartoons on my girlfriend’s computer and, on a future day when we’re not too burned out from and/or pissed off about our respective jobs, we have a mountain of board games to fulfill our senses of communal distraction.  But, in the meantime, I’ve used some of my new disposable income to acquire and consume – in my usual hyper-obsessive style – a few video games for my portable systems.  They’re games consciously chosen, instead of like back when I used to have one night stands with any random stimuli with 16 bits and a boner, but it still adds up to time that could be better spent.  It still adds up to more waiting.

Yet I also feel like there are cracks in the old wall.  Evidence?  Well, this, kind of.  In my last place, and even back when I lived alone in La Crosse’s Stately Y Manor, I’d get so freaked out – in my usual hyper-obsessive style – over the minutiae of every sentence of even the most inconsequential things I’d ever written that it would take me a day to creak out something that could have taken an hour’s time.  Which is how long this has taken, thus far.  Thanks, improv.

But this column is something structured, something needed from me, requested from an external source, an editor needing material to fill a newspaper.  The true test of success in my new, voided ecosystem is whether I start writing things unasked for, works that nobody but me has any vested interest in the completion of.  I have a bizarrely reliable work ethic, despite my tendencies to despise the expectations of others.  I do what’s needed.  The problem is that, for all my narcissism and megalomania, I haven’t yet adapted to the idea that it’s even more important for me to be brilliant when I’m the person who needs something from me.  Instead, my earth-shattering ambitions remain optional.  That is bullshit.  That must change.

We’ll see how that goes.  I did buy a lamp for my den tonight.  Perhaps it will illuminate something.

August 23, 2011
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Y Marks the Spot: The Staged Chaos

I can’t say that in the past year I’ve spent nigh-homeless – sleeping on an air mattress in a flea-ridden house on the verge of collapse, getting rejected for jobs I’m grossly overqualified for, and counting my comatose life by the week instead of by the day – I’ve never considered moving back to La Crosse.  Sure, I would have been really unhappy and felt really defeated, but every so often it felt like defeat, at the very least, would bring a little stability and familiarity.  As much as I find a great deal of fault with it, La Crosse is my home.

Yet there was one point which I reminded myself of every time these regressive thoughts crept into my depressed brain.  It pretty much became the last line of defense that kept me out here in Washington even in my most frustrated lows.

La Crosse doesn’t have improv.  So I can’t go back.

I found improv on the day after I arrived in Bellingham, though it would be a month before its importance to me took shape.  On the second day, my new roommates showed me around my new city’s fantastic downtown, where I wandered around a bit wide-eyed.  We drifted into a small coffee shop, and everyone else in my group ordered things.  Since I don’t drink coffee and don’t care about measly café food, I lingered off near the wall, thumbs in pockets, and I stared at the giant block of fliers upon it.

There was one poster which I gravitated toward, a mockery of Pulp Fiction’s cover art in which Uma Thurman’s hip sneer replaced by another girl’s silly smirk.  Clearly the show it was hyping seemed like something that I’d be into (especially if they brought out the Gimp), but as I was still overwhelmed from crossing half the country it flew over my head.  We left the café and wandered across the street to a record store, where I found a Wesley Willis album for sale – a clear and time-honored indication that good things were in store for me.

A few weeks later, the poster and I would again cross paths.  One thing I’ve long wanted to start doing is performing stand-up comedy, but I hadn’t been able to find a consistent open mic in La Crosse to work on it.  One of my goals in coming to Washington was to find a comedy venue and start performing, and a quick Google search in this pursuit brought me to the place advertised by Fake Uma.  This would turn out to be the best Google search I’ve ever done.

Discovering improv at the Upfront Theatre was the same sort of lightning bolt to the brain that happened to me when I started writing these sorts of things and seeing them in print in the Second Supper.  Like, Jesus, I didn’t have my entire life and the rest of the world figured out after college, and there were still plenty of amazing things about myself and said world to find.  I found one such game changer during the Upfront show on the Thursday before my improv education began.  The hour and a half of people on stage, just making shit up, was both hilarious and a serious revelation.

I’ve described the way I felt watching that show the same way to a few people, and a year into improv hasn’t dulled the feeling at all.  It felt as though I had found my tribe.

I’m big into chaos and goofing off and making things and the eastern religion stripes of nihilism, and improv satisfies all of these sensibilities.  It’s something that I both knew from the start I’d be great at, and it’s a process which has made me get over myself and work really hard to get better.  Improv has made me proud of failure.  It makes me less paranoid and insular and frustrated.  It makes me a far better writer (when I stop being lazy or depressed and actually write).  It taught me to get over my own agendas.  It has made me far more brilliant.

Improv has been the one consistently good thing I’ve had going in the past year.  Sometimes, it was the only good thing.

After a year of classes, I now perform about once every other week in the Upfront’s student portion of its Thursday shows.  A group of six of us will go out, get about a half hour of time, and go berserk making shit up.  Sometimes we screw up, sometimes we’ll say horrible things that derail the scenes, but mostly we destroy the crowd.  After just about every show I leave feeling as though I’ve helped to accomplish something amazing.  I feel like an architect who makes skyscrapers out of the sky.

This is something I want to keep doing.  I don’t care how, or where, or with whom.  The Staged Chaos is in my blood and in my future, and that alone has made my adventure worth it.

August 10, 2011
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Y Marks the Spot: What’s Old Is Crue Again

Not the danger I was looking for.

The message, forwarded to me by Captain Adam Bissen of the USS Second Supper, contained the typical chummy form letter used by music publicists since music publicists emerged from the oceans.  Hey, super-cool people of [insert publication], just wanted to let you know about [insert band], who are coming through [insert town] on [insert date].  Would you be cool with inserting a little publicity for the show into your fine publication?  We can set up an interview if you’re interested.  You rawk!

The only difference between this message and every other one I’ve received since I emerged from the music journalism oceans was that [insert band] was Motley Crue.

“You interested?” Bissen asked.  Shit yes, says I.

Yet what would probably have been the biggest music interview of my phony career in music journalism was not to be.  As it turns out, I don’t feel that bad about missing out.

The next message I received from Captain Bissen cast doubt upon the interview’s likelihood.  It included another forwarded message, this one a response from Admiral Roger Bartel of the USS Second Supper to Motley Crue’s publicist.  I’m pretty sure Roger wasn’t using a form letter.

The summary of it is that while there are a lot of local venues and businesses that support the Second Supper, Fort McCoy has not been one of them, so there’s not much reason for the Supper to promote its shows.  After giving a shoutout to more symbiotic venues like Freedom Fest, the Kickapoo County Fair, and the Eau Claire Jazz Festival, he closes with this awesome line: “for some reason Fort McCoy is not interested in reaching audiences under 50, which is exactly our audience. Sorry we can’t be of more help.”

Shit yes, says I.

Here’s something I’ve felt for years which may not make me popular among certain people of my hometown: I don’t think that most people in La Crosse give a shit about anything that isn’t safe, simple, and right in front of them.  La Crosse has no sense of creative community beyond a few freaks who all get ignored because beer is cheaper and more readily procured.  Major bands play major shows at the Warehouse all the time and the Root Note has thrown together some sweet performances and Jammin’ George is one of the funniest bastards I’ve ever met and I’ve heard word about a bunch of Noise City schmucks sowing discord at the Cavalier and there have been loads of amazing musicians in town scraping by doing shows in the dirtiest corners of bars and basements and Chris Zobin puts bologna on his face and croons about the dangers of shaking babies and La Crosse as a whole simply cannot be bothered to give the slightest subatomic particle of a fuck about any of it.

But Motley Crue?  A band as old as I am?  Golden.  Hordes of my fellow Midwesterners will show up at Fort McCoy, probably ignore any song that isn’t “Dr. Feelgood,” “Kickstart My Heart,” or “Girls, Girls, Girls,” go nuts for those songs, fart, and go home.  La Crosse’s other newspaper will cover the show with its typical bland tripe, and the radio stations will fawn.  Fists will be pumped, heads will be banged, rebellion will be faked, and what I’m assuming will be a fine, high-production show will go off without a hitch or the faintest sense of danger.  I doubt anybody will go home afterwards and write a song.

This void is a big reason why I left La Crosse, and why I don’t ever expect to live there again.

Bissen told me that if I really wanted to, I could pursue the Motley Crue interview, but after reading Roger’s letter (and being really, really proud of it) I lost all interest.  Ultimately, my decision not to go for the interview was based less on giving the finger to La Crosse’s smug and sedate victory lap rock concert scene than it was on my complete disinterest in interviewing a band that has been around since the 80s and has had its dirt splashed across a vast product line of books and VH1 specials.  What the hell am I, or anybody, going to add to the story?  I’m assuming it would end up being the whole prerecorded “this is our best album/tour ever” bullshit hype that makes reading most Q&As with major musicians pointless.

Besides, if you’re a fan of Motley Crue, you don’t really need a prick like me to convince you to go, do you?

So Motley Crue is playing this Friday at Fort McCoy.  You’re welcome, [insert publicist].  The show will probably be pretty good.  Go if you want.  Or don’t.  I don’t give a shit.

August 2, 2011
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