If Joni Mitchell were East African and met Nina Simone for tea in San Francisco’s Mission District, she might end up sounding like Meklit Hadero. Meklit is a true modern global artist: born in Ethiopia, raised in US and nurtured for the last several years in San Francisco’s richly diverse arts scene. Add in a warm and luminous singing voice and lyrical songwriting that moves from the starkly personal to the poetically metaphoric, and you have her entrancing debut full-length recording, “On a Day Like This…”, released by Porto Franco Records on April 20th, 2010.

While Meklit’s music is like a sponge soaking up influences from all over the world, in some ways she’s the perfect embodiment of the City by the Bay – cosmopolitan, striking and worldly, with an outlook that seems to change every few blocks or so. In fact, it’s tempting to tag Meklit and “On a Day Like This…” – with its jazzy but expansive vibe, moods that veer from the hushed to the impassioned, and a female voice so lushly spellbinding it draws you into its world – as San Francisco’s answer to Norah Jones.

Meklit is a TED Global Fellow, the founder of the Arba Minch Collective, and a resident artist at the Red Poppy Art House in San Francisco.

Reviews:
"You may not have heard Meklit Hadero's music before, but once you do, it'll be tough to forget... [Her] sound is a unique blend of jazz, Ethiopia, the San Francisco art scene and visceral poetry; it paints pictures in your head as you listen."
NPR’s Tell Me More

"Hadero is a heartfelt songwriter creating music that is playful and dexterous."
Derek Beres, Sing Out Magazine

"Hadero possesses a flawless range which is as seamless as ballet slippers on a hardwood floor."
Lisa Torem, Chicago Examiner

"Meklit Hadero... combines N.Y. jazz with West Coast folk and African flourishes, all bound together by Hadero’s beguiling voice, which is part sunshine and part cloudy day."
Nevin Martell, Filter Magazine

"Soulful, tremulous and strangely cinematic, Hadero's voice will implant scenes in your mind — a softly lit supperclub, a Brooklyn stoop, a sun-baked road. Close your eyes, listen and dream."
Lynn Jacobson, Seattle Times

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