Meklit Hadero — singer-songwriter, cultural organizer, and architect of transformative performance experiences — contains multitudes.
Born in Ethiopia’s capital, raised in Brooklyn, New York and a frequent visiter to Seattle to visit her large extended family, Meklit has long lived at the cross-cultural intersection of geography, language, and lineage.
Ahead of an album release concert event at Seattle's Triple Door on Feb. 28, Meklit talked with KNKX about her newest record A Piece of Infinity. Released on the nonprofit record label Smithsonian Folkways, the new record highlights Ethiopian jazz lineages and the power of music to heal.
“I was really interested in this opportunity to put Ethiopian folk music and original songs inspired by folk music in the canon right next to the releases by Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and Elizabeth Cotton,” she said.
Ethiopia to Seattle, and back again
These days, Hadero's home base is San Francisco, Calif., but considering her family ties to the Emerald City, she may as well be an honorary Seattleite.
“My last show was with the Ethiopian Community Center of Seattle in October [2025] because I literally have sixty cousins and my mom who lives in Seattle, so Seattle is actually one of my anchor homes…I think my first show in Seattle was, like, eighteen years ago or something like that,” she said.
While 60 cousins might sound hyperbolic, Meklit’s family tree has deep roots in the city extending beyond her own mother to local talents such as Ethiopian producer and MC Gabriel Teodros. But Meklit’s discovery of music as a communal asset began long before her family planted seeds in the multicultural neighborhoods of Seattle.
That complexity of heritage, language, and place is a through line for Meklit’s career, and nowhere are those themes more prevalent than on A Piece of Infinity — an album of reimagined Ethiopian folk music and originals inspired by her own family’s history.
Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to an ethnic Kambaata father and an Amhara mother, Meklit was of two worlds before she ever left her country of origin. With two-year-old Meklit in tow, her family fled their ancestral home to eventually settle in the multicultural neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York.
“We came as refugees, and I started to just really understand that people are multiple and that culture is multiple and that every culture has a different piece of the wisdom prism," she said. "You know, it's like we get to reflect different parts of this giant mirror back to each other and amplify it together. And nowhere do I feel that more than in the music.”
A coincidental discovery
Her earliest musical memories came during her formative years spent wrapped in the sounds of the Caribbean, Black American, and Jewish communities around her and coming home to hear her mother’s songs floating through the walls.
”My mother was the singer of the house. She was always humming, you know, classic Amharic songs,” she said.
Those songs included “Ambessel,” which Meklit revisits on A Piece of Infinity, along with the music from her father’s home in the Kambaata region of Southern Ethiopia.
“It was actually one of my big deep desires in this journey of making this record to reach into Kambaata music because I didn't really actually grow up with it, even though I grew up with my father who was from there,” she said.
In fact, rather serendipitously, Meklit and her father connected through the music after an unexpected discovery. While compiling music for the record, Meklit stumbled upon a SoundCloud recording of an Ethiopian music festival which featured a song from her father’s childhood village.
“So the song is called ‘Geefata’, and actually, the SoundCloud recording that I found of that festival was three days long,” she said.
Committed to the potential of discovering a hidden digital treasure, she scrubbed through the file minute by minute until she struck gold.
“I listened through three days of festival tape to find the group from Kambaata,” she said.
At the time, she wasn’t quite sure of the full value of the discovery, but she soon found out it was more than just any song, after she showed it to her father.
“He really just kind of stopped and he was like, ‘Meklit, this is the song. This is not just any song...This is the song of our joy and our strength and our celebration,’” she said.
For every birth, wedding, successful hunt, celebration, or otherwise joyful moment in her father’s village, “Geefata” was the song for the community. Adding it to the tracklist for A Piece of Infinity was a “no brainer” for the singer.
Moreover, as “Geefata” loses prevalence in Kambaata through cultural diffusion, complicated by diasporic migration and time, the song’s place on the record also represents a central thesis of cultural preservation: “It's about living culture, culture that evolves,” she said.
Preserving Ethiopian music
Released by Smithsonian Folkways, an arm of the Smithsonian Institution concerned with the preservation of folk music around the world, A Piece of Infinity joins a historic canon of musical releases from iconic American folk artists, but unlike its predecessors, Meklit’s record showcases a broader American identity.
“All of these deep, deep folk artists from the United States, and it's like, 'oh, they are actually very fluid in understanding a very broad notion of what preservation is in the context of American folk music,'” she said.
Armed with the skills of engineers and producers from San Francisco’s Women’s Audio Mission — the world’s only studio built and run exclusively by women — and with the collaborative talents of her band, as well as featured artists harpist Brandee Younger and saxophonist Camille Thurman, A Piece of Infinity is the realization of an ongoing ancestral story of survival. It’s also a statement for an evolving multicultural America that Meklit calls “an ancient technology that we have for bringing people together.”
When asked about how she sees her work and the value of creating art and music in our chaotic and, often, unsettling cultural landscape, Meklit stressed that we can't forget the things that make us who we are.
"We can't forget the things that remind us of our strength, our collective power, our interconnection…I see myself as a singer whose work is to create transformative performance experiences for people to be able to access their own freedom and healing," she said.
When Meklit takes the stage on Saturday, Seattle’s Triple Door is sure to transform into a community gathering space for connection in a disconnected time — an audience of strangers, friends, and cousins sharing a moment of joy through music.
