Meklit, the Ethiopian-born San Francisco musician and cultural activist, has spent the last decade gathering disparate artists together to illuminate the themes and forces that unite them.
In the Nile Project, she and Egyptian musicologist Mina Girgis created a transnational collective that brought together musicians from nearly a dozen Nile-traversed East African nations to share music, culture and strategies for water conservation.
More recently, Meklit, who performs and records under a single name, has overseen the multimedia empire Movement, a podcast, radio show and concert series focusing on musical stories emerging from global migration.
Her latest endeavor, the Movement Immigrant Orchestra, debuts Saturday afternoon as part of the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, and instead of taking the show on the road, she’s building a scene here at home.
The program showcases collaborations between a bevy of brilliant artists who have settled in the Bay Area, including Mexican singer/songwriter Diana Gameros, Malian string virtuoso Mamadou Sidibé, Spanish guitarist Javi Jimenez, Cuban trombonist Obrayan Calderon, Taiwanese cellist Roziht Edwards, and Haitian singer Lalin St. Juste.
The idea was born in the first years of the pandemic, when the shroud of isolation and shuttered venues made connecting with other musicians particularly difficult. So many players had left the region, often with little fanfare, “that networks had frayed and fallen apart,” Meklit said. “People are still here, but they have to work extra hard to find each other and then need extra glue to keep on working.”
In her own life she was feeling the need for more face-to-face interaction. Talking to other musicians, she found that many felt siloed in their own communities, hungering to work with neighboring artists.
“The feedback was, we need this and want this,” she said. “I was really missing the tangible part I could feel in everyday life. The podcast is amazing but it’s mostly talking to people on Zoom. Residencies last for a week or two, but then you come back home. We need to be doing community-building work from the ground up where we are.”
The project started with a series of informal gatherings over dinner, just to get people sharing the same space. Almost instantly collaborations started to take root. Guitarist Javi Jiménez, the founder and leader of the popular flamenco-meets-Gypsy jazz combo Barrio Manouche, started working out a song with Mamadou Sidibé, whose innovative work on the string ngoni made him an essential musical partner for Malian superstar Oumou Sangaré.
With support from a Zellerbach Family Fund grant, the gatherings materialized into a musical assemblage featuring an array of cross-cultural conversations. The orchestra is built on a core band that accompanies the various collaborations, with Jiménez, Carnatic percussionist Rohan Krishnamurthy, Italian percussionist Marco Peris, and Iranian American bassist/composer Safa Shokrai.
Steeped in jazz, Shokrai is well-versed in bridging traditions as the longtime rhythm section anchor for Diaspora Arts Connection’s annual Let Her Sing showcase, which brings a dozen women from Iran and neighboring countries to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Sept. 6. With its constant musical recombinations, the Movement Immigrant Orchestra offers a different kind of leap into the unknown.
“There’s this sense sometimes that any creative person feels that everything has been done already,” he said. “Movement Immigrant Orchestra is a reminder and an answer to myself that it’s a big world and there are lots of things we haven’t experienced or heard or read.”
Peris, a founding member of the Balkan brass band Inspector Gadje, has played an essential role wrangling the sprawling orchestra into shape. As Meklit’s co-parent and creative partner, he came up with an collaborative structure for the project, while arranging all the details required for rehearsals.
“I’m the dentist, pulling teeth,” he said. “I’m making sure all the arrangements are done and that we can make the most of our limited rehearsal time, even as far as finding babysitting. Some musicians said ‘This sounds so exciting, but I can’t do it. I’m the primary childcare person.’ What if we found child care on site? At our first rehearsal there’ll be three kids, and for the dress rehearsal at least four.”
For Meklit, who’ll be releasing an album of traditional Ethiopian songs on Smithsonian Folkways next year, the orchestra’s debut lands felicitously about a week before Enkutatash, the Ethiopian new year.
“I decided to bring an Ethiopian new year song,” she said. “This is not a project about traditional music. We said, bring the songs that you want. But that’s where I wanted to go. It’s also a really danceable number, and we want this to be a celebration.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
MEKLIT’S MOVEMENT IMMIGRANT ORCHESTRA
When & where: 1 p.m. Aug. 31; Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco; free; ybgfestival.org
