This piece was featured first on Jan 22 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.
There are some Bay Area figures who just seem to distill an essence of this place. Some are writers, a Maxine Hong Kingston, a Dave Eggers, an Ada Limon, a Tommy Orange. Some are politicians, Barbara Lee, say. Others are famous for a variety of reasons—Stewart Brand, Amy Tan, Marshawn Lynch, Samin Nosrat, Steve Jobs, Judith Butler. Just hella Bay Area people, you might say.
You don’t have to even like these folks to appreciate that they embody some dimension of the Bay Area. These are our people.
And I have personally added a new icon to this charm bracelet of place: Meklit Hadero.
I had heard tell of Meklit and ran into her at an afterparty a while back. I knew she was a powerful musician and a scene builder. For a Forum live music show tomorrow, I’ve been listening to a lot of her music, which is rooted in heritage and also constantly reaching for new musical territory. But her podcast, Movement with Merlot Hadero, is a real revelation.
In its third season, Meklit interviews artists about their experiences with music and migration, weaving together the personal and creative with an intense, gentle intelligence.
She’s interviewed some of my favorite artists from across the world: the Chilean-French rapper Ana Tijoux, Cuban musician Climafunk, Chhom Nimol of Dengue Fever, Adi Oasis, and Forum fave Sid Sriram.
It’s just an incredible roster of global music, framed around the way that the global movement of peoples has transformed music. Migration has created unprecedented configurations of people, and at those interfaces between cultures and traditions, people make the new.
Meklit, herself, is a brilliant example of how this works. Constantly on the move as a kid in a refugee family, she found her way to Yale for college. Alongside making music, she has been a National Geographic Explorer and a TED Senior Fellow, while splitting time between the Bay and Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.
Her latest project is Movement, of which the podcast is a part. Movement also is the home for the Movement Immigrant Orchestra, which brings together 11 musicians from 10 countries “to share their cultural power and resilience with each other and the broader Bay Area community.”
What I’m trying to say is: Meklit is one of those people who is fusing together a new tradition out of the experiences that so many immigrants share as they come to know the United States. This orchestra does not exist outside this specific time and confluence of diasporas. Another way to put it: this thing she’s creating is so Bay Area that it almost hurts.
Some people may want the United States to go back to an imagined (white) past, but what a greater feat of imagination it is to remix the legacies of our world into a real future of mutuality and cooperation. And in that timeline, I will be bumping Meklit, I promise you that.
Oh, and if you want to hear Meklit’s music, listen to Forum tomorrow at 9am. We’ve got her live and it’s gonna be lit.
Alexis Madrigal, Co-Host, Forum
My Tipline
- Meklit and Forum fave August Lee Stevens live at the Freight!
- The Oakland library is celebrating its 75th anniversary. Go!
- You know I love my waterfront artists and writers. Tamarack is hosting a super cool event with them.
- Golden Sardine, the best bar in San Francisco, hosts its 2nd anniversary party on Sunday.
- Great looking event at Clio’s next week celebrating journalist Hillary Rosner’s book ROAM (w/friend of the pod Marissa Ortega-Welch).
My Picks
FOOD
Revisiting Smokehouse, a Berkeley Classic for Late-Night Burgers and Shakes
Smokehouse is around the corner from my house and trust me on this one: it rules and is exactly the kind of burger and fries you really want. (Shakes are good, too.)
NEWS
A Generation Orphaned by War: Ukrainian Children Grow Up Amid Loss and Recovery
Rich and important reporting from Kyiv
ARTS
Inside the Planetarium, Richmond’s New DIY Venue Where Anything Goes
The punk in me honors the punk in you