A few years ago, Meklit Hadero was doing a 9-to-5 administrative gig at the Haas Foundation here and taking private vocal lessons on the side. The sweet-voiced, Ethiopian-born Yale graduate wasn’t figuring on a singing career. But after an unforgettable night at the funky little Red Poppy Art House on Folsom Street, music became her life and the day job tapered away.
Walking into the little Mission District room for the first time, she found two guitar players in opposite corners, a drummer in a third and a guy playing the oud, an ancient North African lute, up in the tiny loft. “It was an incredible experience. You were surrounded by the music,” Hadero says. “They were playing a groove, and everyone was kind of bopping, then suddenly this guy Fernando started signing a call-and-response, and everything just sparked. The whole room became like one. It’s very rare to feel that connected to one person, let alone a whole room full of people. I thought, ‘Wow, what is this place?’ ”
Smitten, she eventually started singing at the multidisciplinary art house, where you can learn to draw or dance flamenco, and where some of the most creative young musicians in town play for receptive crowds. It’s now home base for Hadero, an artist in residence, who’s cropping up in a number of interesting settings these days, playing solo dates here, around the Northwest and elsewhere, and with Nefasha Ayer, a cross-cultural band that riffs on dancing grooves and floating melodies.
Simple tunes
Tonight at Epic Arts in Berkeley, Hadero performs the simple tunes on her first CD, “Eight Songs,” on a triple bill with two other “black women and their guitars,” as she jokingly puts it: Cristina Orbe and Akosua. On Sunday, Nefasha Ayer gets down at Amnesia on Valencia Street.
A few Saturdays ago, the band, whose name means “the wind that travels” in the Amharic language of Ethiopia, stirred up the crowd packed into the Red Poppy. A loose-limbed group that stitches ragas and reggae, Ethiopian jazz and Congolese grooves, the band was formed by Hadero and guitarist Todd Brown, a painter who started the art house in 2003 with tango dancer Alexander Allende and now directs the nonprofit with Hadero. The music aims to explore the longing of people caught between countries and cultures, “the space of in-between,” where the sounds of Africa, India and the Americas connect. The players include classical Indian and jazz saxophonist Prasant Radhakrishnan, master Afro-Peruvian percussionist Lalo Izquierdo on the box drum called the cajón, bassist Miles Jay, Abdi Jibril from Kenya on congas and maracas, and Keenan Webster playing the West African marimba called the balafon and the lute-like kora.
“What was so joyous that night was that we were all from different cultural backgrounds. But we were expressing it with the music, without having to say a thing,” says Hadero, 27, who was born in Addis Ababa but grew up in Iowa and Brooklyn. Her parents are both doctors who left Ethiopia in the violent years following the 1974 revolution, going first to East Germany, then, after making it across to West Berlin, to the United States, with the help of Catholic Charities. They landed in Iowa, where they had a friend. Her father got a residency in New York, where the family lived for many years. (Now divorced, her father lives in Florida, her mother in Seattle, where Hadero’s cousin, noted rapper Gabriel Teodros, also lives.) A bright, soft-spoken woman who wears flowing clothes and a flower in her hair, Hadero sings in English and Amharic. She projects an inner glow as her gentle voice moves in and out of the sound like a jazz instrumentalist - and her hands do a few Hindu-like waves - rather than calling attention to itself.
Flowers in her hair
“I always wanted to be a singer, I just didn’t know if I could do it,” says Hadero, sitting on a stool at the Red Poppy, sipping coffee from a mug bearing van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” She’s wearing an orange sundress and a white silk orchid in her hair. She’s been wearing a flower, real and fake, since college and can’t seem to shake it. “It expresses some very basic part of who I am,” she says, smiling. “It’s pretty direct.”
Hadero sang in choirs in grade school - she was 12 when a piano teacher turned her on to Billie Holiday - and in high school, and occasionally sang a tune a cappella in a performance series she started at Yale, where she studied political science. After moving here, she studied voice with David Babich and other local teachers and took songwriting, musicianship and guitar classes at Blue Bear School of Music. She took the leap after Brown urged her to sing at one of the shows the Mission Arts & Performance Project puts on at the Red Poppy and other neighborhood spots. Brown had never heard her, but sensed she had something. She sang an a cappella version of Bob Marley’s “Waiting in Vain” and Brown was sold.
“I did it on a leap of faith,” says Brown, who paints and teaches workshops at the Red Poppy, where his expressionist canvases hang on the walls, a printing press sits in the bathroom and wooden chairs, gauzy white curtains and a rainbow-striped hammock dangle from the ceiling. “Sometimes that really doesn’t work out. This time it did.”
Brown and Hadero, who are not romantically involved, write the music for Nefasha Ayer. Next year they’re doing a residency at the de Young Museum, and this fall are putting on a series of Red Poppy performances and exhibitions at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as part of its Bay Area Now show. Hadero will start work soon on a commission from Brava Theater to write music for a new play by Brian Thorstensen about dissidents and artists who disappear in times of political upheaval.
Writing music for Nefasha Ayer, Brown, who has a feel for Congolese and other guitar-based African music, cooks up a groove and a simple harmonic structure. Hadero listens and begins to picture images; she creates the melody and lyrics that tell the story.
“The music I come up with tends to be very rhythmic, and her tendency is to float, to have a melody that really circles the rhythm,” Brown says. “The two fall in together, and people love the feeling.”
Influences
Hadero has listened to Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Virginia Rodrigues, who inspired her pretty version of the Brazilian song “Negrume da Noite” on the CD, whose covers she and artist friends hand-painted in a homemade way that reflects the music. She cites Nina Simone and Mexican singer Lila Downs as big influences. Simone’s emotional intensity gets her, and she loves the way Downs changes the color and texture of her voice, “from small and delicate to expansive to gravelly to sweet. I really try to do that.”
Hadero writes spare songs about love and longing, sung over basic guitar chords. “I wouldn’t call myself a guitarist. I use the guitar,” Hadero says. Her solo work “has a kind of preciousness to it, but it’s changing as I grow in my musicianship. The solo music is kind of letting people into my world a little bit. Nefasha Ayer is going out into something greater together. It has this grander intention. It’s a larger canvas.” Working with these musicians, Hadero has become more comfortable with improvisation, “which is the real juice. You may not know where you’re going, but everybody’s right there with you. It’s a glorious thing.”
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