Meklit Live Purdue Convocations 2016 - 27.02.16
Purdue Convocations' 2015-16 season will feature more than 25 events, including an array of Broadway musicals, lectures, opera, theatre, music and concerts
Ethiopian-born, Brooklyn-raised, and Bay Area-nurtured, Meklit Hadero—a folk-jazz-global roots singer, musician, and cultural activist—describes herself as an in-betweener living along musical hyphen lines. She’s as comfortable twisting an Arcade Fire indie-rock anthem into a jangly torch song as she is reversing the influences by infusing propulsive rock undercurrents into interpretations of her native land’s traditional music.
With a honeyed voice that can shift from sinewy to sensuous in an instant, Meklit (muh-kleet) channels her globally informed musical sensibilities to transform musical genres and styles with facile skill. Meklit’s latest album, 2014’s We Are Alive, is a deeply fluid commingling of sounds, grooves, and styles, from reimagining where the storied musical “A Train” might travel in today’s world to the inspiring assertion of uplift after hardship in its title track. In that spirit, Meklit also has wed her prodigious gifts for voice and songwriting with her political science studies at Yale to address her passion for social justice and community engagement.
Named a 2009 TED Global Fellow, Meklit co-founded the Nile Project in 2011—a curated collaboration of musicians from 11 Nile-basin countries intended to foster cross-cultural empathy and environmental curiosity to help unite a socially and politically divided region of East Africa. It is precisely this combination of talents that has led Convocations to name her an Artist-In-Residence for Spring 2016 to participate in immersive classroom activities on campus, as well as to work with student musical ensembles. Her residency culminates in a club-setting performance at the Lafayette Theater in downtown Lafayette.
