The Soul of Music: Meklit Hadero Tells Stories of Migration | Overheard at National Geographic

[Music] Hey there, I'm Kyrie Douglas. I'm a producer here at Overheard, and this is the final episode of our four-part series focusing on music exploration and Black history. It's called "The Soul of Music," and National Geographic explorers will be sitting down with some of our favorite musicians to discuss how history and the natural world inspire their art and adventures. Today's guests are both explorers and musicians: Mle Hado and Jiwi Beri.

My name is Mle Hado. I'm a singer-songwriter, Ethiopian jazz musician, and I'm also the co-founder, host, and producer for a podcast and radio show, and live show called "Movement," which explores the intersection of migration and music. One of Mle's inspirations and mentors is Mulatu Astatke, an Ethiopian multi-instrumentalist who developed the unique style of Ethio Jazz.

You know, Ethio Jazz came from Mulatu going to the U.S. to explore his own creative practice as a musician and for his own education. He was interacting with amazing musicians—Jazz musicians. Jazz, of course, was born from the experience of the forced migration of slavery, which brought people primarily from West Africa to the Americas and birthed all of the musics that are thought of as American musics: Jazz, hip hop, blues. And then Mulatu goes there as an Ethiopian artist, and there's this famous moment where he interacts with John Coltrane, and Coltrane is like, "Man, bring your music into this. What does that look like?"

And then he creates Ethiopian Jazz from that experience. He takes Ethiopian Jazz and moves back to the continent, and then Ethiopian Jazz explodes around the world. So it's this cyclical cycle of migration changing culture, and migration influencing culture, evolving culture, revolutionizing culture. It's the movements of people that are creating like these specific historical changes in music, and so that's the music that I make. I see myself as making migration music. But I've always known that that's not a story that's just about me; that's a story about how culture and movements of people interact.

This is Overheard, a show where we eavesdrop on the wild conversations we have here at Nat Geo and follow them to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world. After the break, Mle is joined by National Geographic Explorer Jiwi Beri to discuss Mle's transmedia storytelling project, Movement, Jiwi's use of the ancient instruments known as rock gongs, and how the natural world inspires the music. Jiwi is based out of Kenya; he produces music and he used to be a DJ.

My name is Jiwi Beri. I focus a lot on conservation and water filmmaking, but my earliest passion has been music, and I'm very excited about this episode because we get to meet an incredible musician from the African continent.

More after the break, but first, fuel your curiosity with a free one-month trial subscription to Nat Geo Digital. You'll have unlimited access on any device anywhere, ad-free, with our app that lets you download stories to read offline. Explore every page ever published with a century of digital archives at your fingertips. Check it all out for free at natgeo.com/explore.

[Music] More. Hello, hello, hello, Jiwi. It's such a pleasure to be in conversation with you. So you received a National Geographic grant for your project Movement—it's a transmedia storytelling initiative about migration and music. Tell me more about Movement. How did it get started, and what kind of stories have you told?

Well, Movement got started, actually, in the last months of 2017, so we've been at this project for five years now. We started out as just a podcast, and then we evolved. Of course, we have this wonderful relationship with National Geographic, which is allowing us to really look at specific communities. So we were in Abu Dhabi looking at what migration and cultural innovation look like in the United Arab Emirates, and we're going to be in UCLA in Los Angeles looking at migration and music as it evolves there, and in New York as well. The story of migration and culture is the story of New York, but that's not the story that we hear about New York. We don't hear that immigrants, migrants, and refugees are New York.

You know, so for me, Movement is an opportunity to change the conversation around migration and put people who've experienced it at the forefront of defining what those narratives are, and also do it in a way that touches a wellspring that is deep in us, which is culture and music and the ways that our connection to ancestry and the sounds of our roots are actually driving innovation across the world.

Wow, no, that's incredible. You yourself had an interesting childhood, and how did that play into your role of how you're sort of going in and looking at music and the movement of people? You know, what was your childhood experience like?

Well, I left Ethiopia. I was born in Addis Ababa, and my family and I left when I was about two years old. We went to Germany, and then from there we went to the U.S. We came as refugees, both to Germany and to the U.S. So I grew up in that context, and you know, I grew up with a very Ethiopian household, but at the time there weren't that many Ethiopian diaspora communities in the U.S., so it was a very lonely way to grow up, really.

Music was one of the ways that I stayed connected, and that I felt my way into my identity and also had an opportunity to bring others into that shared experience in a way that let me express my joy and my strength and the strengths of my culture and roots and ancestry. So music was always a part of my upbringing. We used to listen to these old, old, warped, garbled tapes that, like, you know, a cousin would come and they would bring us these tapes from home, and they were these little treasures. Then we were also listening to Prince and Michael Jackson on the radio, and then later I was listening to Duke Ellington and John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Billie Holiday.

So really, like, the places that I've lived have become the music that I've made, but also I think that there are a lot of experiences that we went through that a lot of people who immigrate have in common. You know, the sense of dislocation, a sense of having to remake home, explore what is home, define it for yourself, rebuild community, and all of those things get explored in the music that I make and also are a reason that I'm so, you know, attracted to building community as a part of my creative practice every single day.

It's incredibly powerful just how many influences that we get from our life experiences that music relates to, or actually how music helps us through. There’s a portion of the podcast where you had talked to the Somalian rapper Freak, so I'd like to listen to a little bit of that.

Great. Today on Movement, the story of a Somali rapper in the United Arab Emirates: Mustafa Muhammad Ismael, aka Freak. Do you remember your very first live show?

Yeah, it was 2014. Back then, I had a song called "Unemployed" that kind of went viral in [Music] the city. That was the first project that made me be like, listen, let's not fake it, let's just not talk about we're getting money, right? I'm in a yacht. I'm like, listen, we're going to shoot a video. There’s like a cheap sandwich from Abu Dhabi, it’s literally like half a dollar, the broke people's sandwich that we call it. And literally, we shot the video inside, like literally on the table eating the sandwich.

It just resonated, like a lot of people related to it because a lot of people that used to eat from that place used to hide. They used to eat from that place, and we just exposed it, like, listen, we're those [Music] people. It was a disgrace to be unemployed, or be a guy that doesn't have anything in his pocket, but we turned out to be a funny comedy song. We just listen, dissing ourselves. We uploaded on YouTube literally in like two hours from recording it to uploading it, and know, and sometimes when you don't really care about something, it blows.

I was doing some random things. I was the only Black guy skateboarding that listened to heavy metal, so he was like, "Man, this guy's a freak, like it's a freak of nature." You know, and I just labeled myself that just to give me that power, just to stay on that path. You don’t have to be normal. Sometimes it’s cool not to be normal.

Sometimes, Mustafa was born in the UAE in a city right next to Dubai, but since his parents are from Somalia, he's not actually a citizen. For context, this is a country where roughly 90% of the population are not citizens; they're foreign nationals, usually called expats. In order to stay in the country, they need a visa. And in order to keep that visa, they need a job.

So you can see why a song about unemployment and cheap sandwiches might resonate. It's not just about money; it's about legal status, and this is something Mustafa has had to think about for a long [Music] time.

I never saw anything else than the UAE. I felt like the city hugged me; like the city literally didn't make me feel like I was a stranger. I was around Sudanese, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Egyptians, and, in the Emirates, of course, it's like I never knew that I was an expat until I was like nine or ten.

What was that moment?

It was shocking, to be honest. Like I had to grow up. I needed to find a job; I need to get in the un, need. Because I didn't want to leave after 18; your dad can't sponsor you basically; you earn your own.

And I got you; I called it home, so I'm like, listen, I'll fight until it works out. I stayed, I hustled, I joined a company that I hated just for me to keep doing videos and trying to pursue music on the side, right? My mom was the first obstacle I had to surpass. She was like, "You're here, you're an expat; you need to follow the program; you can't just be you." It's not even a thing, like doing something in the entertainment, let alone in music or business.

That was definitely a no-no back in 2009. Before his first song went viral and before he was even performing, Freak got a job as an usher for the first-ever F1 Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi. He was basically just there to check tickets.

They got Beyoncé to open up for the F1 that day, and I was looking at that stage. I'm like, "Wow!" I was like, 25,000 people, 30,000 people just singing along to her. I'm like, "Wow, this is phenomenal." Like, "I wish I can be on that stage." Ten years later, for the 2019 Grand Prix, Freak was on that stage opening for Future.

So I assume that now you know, you have the visa, now you have that solid foundation.

That's right, yeah. I got a golden visa now. I can stay here for good as a singer as well, like I got it from the government because of what I’m doing, and I never thought this can happen, like just because of music. To be validated and just to feel like important in what I'm doing, and it's beautiful.

So from listening to that podcast, what I found such a poignant moment was that coming from East Africa and how a lot of people have moved to the Middle East to look for work and this and that. Freak really touched a nerve in terms of, you know, there’s that idea of trying to make it, trying to create a career, trying to stay in the country.

I found it quite incredible that through his music, he ended up getting a golden ticket for his visa that he could stay in Abu Dhabi and live there, all through music. These are stories that I mean for us in East Africa, we don’t really hear because we often hear more negative things.

But I'd love to sort of hear your thoughts on it—how music created such a positive effect and change on Freak's life in the Middle East.

Yeah, you know, I agree with you completely. Like, the fact that music was the way that he was able to guarantee his long-term home in the United Arab Emirates is really a story that you just don’t hear very often. One thing that was really powerful for us when we were working on the story with Freak was that we went to the United Arab Emirates, we went to Abu Dhabi to also put on a live show with Freak.

What was really interesting was that in the UAE, something like 90% of the people there are from somewhere else, and so our audience for the live show was the same. There were people in the audience who were parents to kids who were like eight and ten—folks from Ethiopia and from the Philippines, you know, Indonesia.

And they were telling us, "You know, my kids are going to be like Freak; they’re going to be wondering at 18 how are they going to stay in the country." So Freak telling his story ended up being this catalyst for folks in the audience to think about and prepare their own families for what the long-term impacts of living in the UAE are.

Because the thing about Movement is that it's not just about the stories that the artist tells; it's also about the conversations that the stories can spark. What we're trying to do is to share different kinds of experiences than you typically hear.

Because the thing about Freak's story is that it's also a story of joy, of expression, and of the power of culture to make home for people in ways that are unexpected and that are about building community in a new way. And now, he’s touring; he’s going to the UK. He’s came to the U.S. over the summer; he's going all over the Middle East.

But for him, the UAE is home; it's where he was born and raised, so he always goes back there to continue his practice and to continue evolving his community.

Nice! It’s incredible to hear how his career is really [Music] growing. Now, as someone who's traveled and sort of, in a sense, migrated from one place to another from a young age, how do you think places can imprint themselves on people? Do you have a song that is associated with a time in your life?

Right, we all have those songs where a song will come on, and instantly you'll be back—not just in a place like a city, but you'll be back on a particular street corner where you and your friends used to play soccer or football, you know? It was that song that was always on the radio at that time. You know, music becomes imprinted on us, and we go right back to a place, a time, the smells.

For me, I was born in Addis Ababa, and of course, the music of that place was always in my house growing up. But I grew up in Brooklyn, and I was growing up in the time of early hip hop in Brooklyn. I remember we would walk down the street, and there would be B-boys with cardboard boxes. They would undo a cardboard box and a really big box, and they would bring it out, and they would breakdance on the boxes.

You would see ciphers next to those while with people breakdancing and spinning on those cardboard boxes, and there would be lonely saxophonists who would put themselves in just the right place on a subway station so that the acoustics were amazing. You could tell, like, wow, they were an incredible jazz musician.

Then I've been in San Francisco, the San Francisco Bay Area for almost 20 years, and this is the place of singer-songwriters. You know, three chords and the truth. Just like strum your guitar, and you can sing your truth. All of those places have made it into my music.

So for me, place and music are one conversation. It's hard to talk about because we use music to talk about the things that are hard to talk about. So it can be hard to talk about music because instantly you're talking about the thing that you use to talk about the things that are hard to talk about. Like it's hard to talk about migration; it's just hard.

So sometimes it's better if we can hear the sound of migration. If we can be let into the world of people who've experienced it through the sounds that they make, you know it's like music can be a shortcut to help us understand place, but also how place changes people. We're all like tuning forks. You know, let a person sing, and all the places they've loved will resonate and just keep resonating, you know?

Yeah, you know, that’s so interesting because I come from a dance music background, and I used to DJ quite a lot. Although I haven't done it recently, there are certain times that I kind of go on a reminiscent flow and play a song, and all of a sudden I'm transported back to the first time I played that song to a crowd. You can feel the energy again; you can feel the emotion, and it's such a powerful tool, as you know, to help us feel things and also to help us deal with things.

But more recently, within a lot of the work that I've been doing, I've been trying to take that concept but bringing in the natural world to it. So having the sounds of when you wake up, you know, as you grow up and you heard the sounds of birds and things like that and how that also has a similar impact because nature does have its own music in a sense.

So how does the natural world inform music, but also your music?

Well, I’m glad that we’re talking about this because it’s really important. The sounds of a place are a part of its character. When I go to a new place, I'm always listening for what are the sounds that are different here?

Oh, in a rhythmic way, I hear the train going by. Oh, it’s coming now. Oh, it’s coming again! And then you start to get a sense of the pulse of a place through the trains. You know, you can do that. Like, oh, the sound of the crowd is louder now; oh, this is the rush hour. People are making their way through their lives in a pulse, and you can hear that pulse of a city.

For me, it’s also like, though, it’s almost like a way of meditating. Sometimes when I want to feel creative musically, the first thing I'll do is just stop, you know, and just find my way into like a quiet place, quiet my mind, and just listen. Oh, what are the sounds being made right now?

The first song on my last album that I made, the album was called "When the People Move, the Music Moves Too," and the first song was called "This Was Made Here." The rhythm was based on a cooking pan lid that was rolling back and forth on my counter and making this incredible rhythm. It's like, oh, I got to record that! What is happening right?

I feel like it's two things: One is that what do we absorb from the sounds around us, and then the other thing is how are we inspired by the sounds around us? I think that we all long for a relationship to nature, and the natural world is very alive with soundscapes.

There's lows and mids and highs in a natural soundscape; there's maybe the frogs are making the lows, the low croaks, or there's like, you know, the birds are on the highs, or the crickets are just the way that that music will organize itself. Where there's the lows, there’s the bass, there’s the mids like the guitars and the keyboards, there’s the highs like a trumpet or a flute, you know?

Nature organizes itself like that too. It has that in natural soundscapes as well. I think that it's a tool for us to sink into understanding a place, but it's also a way that we can root ourselves wherever we are and find ourselves at home.

And we can get to know a place through its sounds. That also kind of leads me on to your music, and there is talk that we have memories within our DNA, and that can be transferred through generations. That’s such a cool concept, and I'd like to actually play one of your songs and ask you a bit more about it.

And quite fittingly, this song is called "Supernova."

Where did you come from? What did you grow? Those bones, midnight.

Is mirror look up your reflection for debr? That’s the high [Music] for blessing me. Electromagnetic mind. Remember when you used to fly without wings? How you love, how you love to feel the falling cross the universe on a string and stop over, over everything? The way I was made in a supernova.

Everything, the way I was [Music] no. Everything we made in our supernova. Everything we made in our super.

No, I love the energy in that track, thank you. In that song, you say that everything that we are was made in a supernova and it is true that much of the in the universe was produced by Supernova exploding.

Yes, what inspired this song? Did you want to teach people about astrophysics, or is there a deeper meaning?

Well, there are two answers to this question. One is that I was working on—I actually wrote it a long time before I recorded it. At the time, I was working on an Ethiopian hip-hop space opera called "Copper Wire," and we started working with this electrical engineer who was working on the Kepler missions, which is how NASA at the time was looking for Earth-sized planets in other solar systems.

His name was John Jenkins, and he would make sonifications of starlight data that came in through Kepler's telescope—star sounds. They were funky and pulsy, and a lot of them were super weird. But there were a few that were just incredible, and I was just listening to them over and over again. I was like, "I have to collaborate with him. I have to do something. I have to work with this."

It was so incredible to me that I could hear the sound of the twinkle, and I started thinking about stars, and also I was thinking about supernova. I started to think about like every time I saw anything, whether it was the tambourine that I'm looking at right now hanging on my wall or the river that's underneath us or the trees—everything is from those things.

And so it was also an opportunity to write about, you know, how far back do we need to go before we understand that we’re connected to absolutely everything around us? Nothing is ordinary—that everything is sacred.

Everything is hallowed—all of it came from a star. You and you—you know, everyone. Everyone—the person that I'm in a big fight with right now, who I can't stand—they are from the center of a star that is billions of years old.

And so it was helping me to be connected to everything, and so that's what that song is about. It's about this great underlying unity that cannot be broken.

So, as I kind of mentioned, years ago I was working very much in dance music and DJing and having probably far too much fun. But I took a break from music, and it was only recently that I sort of stumbled upon these things called rock gongs, and they're these ancient musical instruments that our ancestors could have played thousands of years ago.

There's a lot we’re trying to figure out about it, but it sent me down this journey where I've been trying to—not even trying—there was this realization that we have these cultures that have gone that we know nothing about, but we have their instruments. We have incredible cultures that are still with us, like the Hadzabi or the San, that we could risk losing, and then they're all based in this incredible environment.

So I went down this kind of crazy path of trying to figure out, can we use these ancient instruments and the sounds of the cultures and the tribes that we stand to lose to make contemporary music?

And I would love to actually play you one of my songs.

I would love that!

[Music] Oh my God, it’s so beautiful. It’s so beautiful. Oh, thank [Music] you, were there rock gongs in that piece? All the percussion, apart from the kick drum that came in at the end, was actual rock gongs.

Wow! And how did you record that? Do you go out with mobile recording equipment?

So those particular rock gongs, it was actually—I hadn’t actually planned on recording. I was on safari, and we stumbled on these rock gongs, and I was just fascinated by the sound of them. I was like, "How can a rock make this sound?" So those particular recordings I’ve done with a little microphone attachment with my iPhone.

Oh wow! But just the resonance of these rocks was incredible, and it took a couple of months afterward to kind of figure it all out. But what was really interesting was that whistle is the sound—it's the whistle that the Hadzabi used to call the honey guide, which is a bird that shows them to the hives.

It was so incredible to sort of what we could consider musical for the Hadzabi. It's how they communicate with nature and elements of nature, and that's life. It was—I thought it was such a powerful thing that music is life; it's part of us.

You know, the tribes and cultures—I know in Africa that sort of music and dancing and everything—it's all part of the same thing, which I think is such a special way of looking at music and how it relates to us.

Absolutely, because it's not separate. It’s not a separate thing that you do, and you're like, "I'm going to go play music now." It's just being—it's your whole being in the world, and the way that your being literally organizes the world is through a practice that is musical but is not separate from life.

I just love that. I have another song that I wanted to ask you about. The song is called "Human."

[Music] Animal. Two legs, two arms, two eyes, and are restless.

So when you want to fly away, all those voices demanding [Music] you. You can’t [Music] be what you a part of; you wanna know how to stay wild?

[Music] Oh, human. There’s something rough, and it longs to run you—the power of nature. It rolls and it fades.

[Music] Your so—in this song, you say, and you want to fly away from all those voices demanding that you be tamed.

Animal, animal, animal— that doesn’t mean you can’t be kind. But what if a part of you knew how to stay wild? Can you break those lyrics down for me? What are you trying to say?

Well, um, it's funny. No one ever chooses this song to talk about. I actually—I don’t know that anybody's ever asked me about it in an interview. I—it was me kind of being annoyed that people try to say they're not part of nature, that people try to say that we're not animals—that we didn’t come from the natural world.

Yes, we did! I get upset that it's used as an insult. Oh, that person is just an animal. Well, what do you think? Animal! Like, the animals are sacred! Like, you can't use that as an insult.

We can’t! Like, even just thinking that there is no less—we are all together here on this Earth, and we have to be aware of our embeddedness in the natural world and not see ourselves as separate, as dominant, as better than. And that's how we're going to get out of this mess that we're in.

So that’s what that song was about.

You know, I completely agree because as long as people see themselves outside of nature, we can’t find the solutions that will help us rebalance the world until we realize we are part of that whole system, and we have to play by those rules of nature, and we have to respect nature because that's what gives us life.

Thank you, Mle. That was so cool. I’d really love to continue the conversation; there’s so much depth in what you do, which is amazing—and you as well. I would love to stay in touch one day. Please take me to a rock gong.

For sure, for sure.

That was Jiwi Beri and Mle Hado, both explorers and musicians in conversation. If you like what you hear and you want to support more content like this, please rate and review us in your podcast app and consider a National Geographic subscription. That's the best way to support Overheard. Go to natgeo.com/explore to subscribe and learn more about Mle Hado and the Movement project at her website, mle music.com. Mle is spelled M-E-K-L-I-T, and you can follow her on Twitter or Instagram at @mlemusic.

Learn more about Jiwi Beri and his first rock project on his website, j.com, that's spelled J-A-WI, and you can follow him on Instagram at Jiwi Beri. Follow Freak on Instagram at @freaktv, that's Freak spelled F-R-E-E-K. The star sounds you heard were provided by John Jenkins, co-investigator for data analysis for the Kepler mission. Learn more about the Kepler mission and star sonification on their webpage.

This is the final episode of "The Soul of Music," but keep listening to all the music from the series. We’ve curated a playlist with some of our favorite tracks from Rhiannon Giddens, Eszter Balint, Mle Hado, as well as some of their peers and inspirations. Just search for National Geographic presents "The Soul of Music" on Spotify.

That's all in the show notes right there in your podcast app. This week's Overheard episode is produced by me, Kyrie Douglas. Our senior producers are Brian Gutierrez and Jacob Pinter. Our senior editor is Eli Chin. Our manager of audio is Carla Wills, who edited this episode. Our executive producer of audio is D’Var Ardalan. Our photo editor is Julie Howe. Ted Woods sound designed this episode, and Hansdale Sue composed our theme music.

The Soul of Music series is produced in collaboration with National Geographic Music. Special thanks to Hen Grace Vancleave, Jennifer Stillson, Breny Greer. This podcast is a production of National Geographic Partners. The Movement podcast is produced by Ian C. and Mle Hado. The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world, funds the work of National Geographic explorers Mle Hado and Jiwi Beri. Michael Trible is the vice president of integrated storytelling, Nathan Lump is National Geographic's editor-in-chief.

Thanks for listening, and see you next time!

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