Ethio-Jazz Vocalist Meklit Releases New Single “Antidote” | LISTEN! New 6-Track EP “Ethio Blue” Coming March 8th, 2024 | Announces New Tour Dates for 2024
Ethio-Jazz Vocalist, Songwriter
And Cultural Activist
MEKLIT
Announces New EP Ethio Blue
Shares New Song “Antidote”
February 7, 2024: Today the visionary Ethiopian-American vocalist, composer, and cultural activist Meklit has announced the release of her new EP Ethio Blue, a prescient six-song collection attuned to inner landscapes.
Recorded with GRAMMY-winning songwriter / producer Dan Wilson, Ethio Blue is powered by an array of Ethio Jazz-inspired grooves, while presenting some of Meklit’s most personal songwriting to date. Meklit has also shared the new single “Antidote”, a bouncing ode to emotional wisdom and self-knowledge, powered by an array of funk, arpeggios, and Ethio Jazz. The Ep is currently available for pre-save / pre-sale here.
“The music of Ethio Blue was designed to “heal ourselves and nourish our hearts,” writes Meklit. “I realized I need to make a record reminding us – myself included – of the power we have and the spirit of resiliency that can refresh us.”
On Ethio Blue, Meklit’s vision is channeled through the prowess of her longtime band, which includes Ethiopian pianist/keyboardist Kibrom Birhane, saxophone maestro Howard Wiley, drummer Colin Douglas, percussionist Marco Peris Coppola, and bassists Sam Bevan and Miles Jay. Guest artists featured on Ethio Blue include legendary Macedonian clarinetist Ismail Lumanovski, Los Angeles singer/songwriter Sara Mulford on synth and keyboard, and Dan Wilson on OP-1 synth.
In 2020 she launched Movement, a transmedia storytelling initiative that lives at the intersection of migration and music. Movement exists as a syndicated podcast and radio show (airing regularly on PRX’s The World to an audience of 2.5M listeners), as well as an ongoing series of live events which brings the conversation before live audiences. For Meklit, Movement stems from her own youth as a refugee, and her hunger for new narratives of migration driven by the folks most impacted by it. It is an opportunity to honor the vastness of immigrant experiences, including themes of joy, curiosity, ancestral wisdom and epiphany, even while making space for the very real presence of trauma, difficulty and pain.
Meklit has collaborated with renowned artists such as Kronos Quartet, Andrew Bird, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and the late creator of funk music, Pee Wee Ellis. Meklit is a National Geographic Explorer, a TED Senior Fellow, and a former Artist-in-Residence at Harvard University and NYU. She is the co-founder of the visionary pan-African Nile Project, a featured voice in UN Women’s theme song and the winner of the 2021 globalFEST Artist Award.
With Ethio Blue, Meklit continues to open her arms to the world with a sound gleaned from Addis Ababa, Los Angeles, New Orleans, San Francisco and beyond. But the frontier she embraces with her new music is the vast and mysterious interiors of the human heart.
Photo Credit: Alexa Trevino
Meklit Tour Dates:
02/15/24 – Silver Spring,MD – Montgomery College – Movement Live
02/17/24 – New York, NY – Joe’s Pub
03/09/24 – San Francisco, CA – Brava! Theater – EP release show
04/04/24 – Claremont, CA – Scripps College
Missing Piece Group