Good morning, Keeps, and welcome to wok F Daily with me your Girl Danielle Moody pre recording from the home Bunker, Folks. So often on WOKF, I try to find the good balance between delivering sometimes really difficult news of the day as well as providing some voices of inspiration and hope and creativity and just a way for us to tap
back in to joy. And today, I am really excited to bring onto the show a musician, an artist, a fellow podcaster, MacLea Hadero, who is an ethio jazz performer as well as the host of the podcas cast movement
that uses music to talk about varied migration stories. And you know, so often I talk about on WOKF that my purpose has always been to try and make you know the news more digestible and to have in depth conversations that are worthy of twenty minutes as opposed to you know, the thirty second or ninety second soundbites that you get on cable news. That some things are worth more than just that hot take, right, that they're worth a conversation. And that's what I hope that you're able
to receive on WOKAF because that's my goal. But when I think that mccleat is doing by being able to tell these stories, for other musicians from around the world, to be able to tell their stories of migration through their music is something that is just extraordinarily special. And she'll say something in this episode that I think is just so important, which is about our collective and our shared humanity that I'm going to be talking about at
nauseum because folks, we are losing it. We are losing it as well as losing our fucking minds on a regular basis with following the headlines and if we are not, I can't say this enough. Taking care of ourself. If that is turning up some music and dancing around your home, if that is swaying, if that is creating, if it is knitting, if it is gardening, if it is listening to poetry, if it's walking, if it's lifting, if it's
doing anything. You need to do it every day. You need to double down on it and triple down on it, because I feel pieces of ourselves being pulled away from us, you know, and just getting down to the bone. And I want to keep feeling. I want to keep having and compassion and love and not just sitting in a place of rage, because I'm telling you, folks, if rage truly was the answer, then the doors would have been opened,
piece would have happened, right. And so there this is where I am in my life right now, which is trying to figure out if there is another way. And I believe that compassion and love, thoughtfulness and critical thinking and reflection are those ways, are those pathways forward? And I really hope that you enjoy this conversation with mcleat Hadero. The podcast is Movement, and I hope that you check
it out wherever you get your podcasts, folks. I am very excited to welcome to OKAF Daily for the very first time mcleat Hadero, who is the host of a fantastic podcast, radio series and live show that stories of global migration through music. Mcleed is a vocalist, songwriter, composer and has found this medium as a way to tell the stories that I tell that you listen to on a regular basis, but much more interesting, mcleid, how did movement get started and why?
Well, movement got started quite a few years ago, and it really began because I was out there in the world going to all these music festivals as a songwriter composer and meeting people from every corner of the globe who had these really interesting, dynamic migration stories, and we'd kind of find we'd learn about each other in like the green rooms of festivals or those places that they set up for all the artists to have dinner together. And I started to realize that, you know, I'm a refugee.
I make ethio jazz, I make music that I think of as migration music, and it's not just me, you know. And I started to think about how many people had stories similar to mine, that were making incredibly genre bending, innovative, bumping music, and that had these stories that had resonance with each other, but that weren't being put together in the same spaces to kind of build solidarity share narratives.
But you know that we were being put together in the sense of like we would be at music festivals together, but people weren't thinking of our music as having anything in common because it might be like an electronic artist, a hip hop artist, and me being in this more acoustic ethio jazz space. So I started to think about, and I've always thought about, how can I tell bigger stories together with others than I can tell by myself,
and Movement was born out of that. We started as a podcast, but very quickly became a live show because I just love the experience of not just being able to tell our stories with our voices, which is so incredibly important and the spoken stories are narratives, but also be able to shine that through the songs that we make and the way that those songs together get to give an experience, an actual, like visceral, physical, bumping, musical, creative experience of just a radically diverse world.
I love that, Oh my god. So first of all, I am a fan of jazz. I've never heard of ethio jazz, so I want you to describe the sound for me so that then I can when we get off, I'm gonna pull it up and listen to it. But what is the vibe? Can you? Can you explain it to us? Yeah?
Yeah, absolutely? And there are great stories in this so Ethiopian jazz. Ethio jazz was born in late sixties and early seventies. It was created by a person by the name of Mulato Astatke, who was the first African to ever attend the Berkeley College of music in Boston, and then after he attended Burke, he was this like incredible composer. He was really really really inspired by the Cubans, and so he was in New York after Berkeley College of after he went to Berkeley, and he was like listening
to the Cubans bring their traditional music into jazz. And then he had this fateful encounter with John Coltrane, who was like Coltrane in the in this like back green room, was like, man, you gotta do this with your traditional music. Latoastak went back to Ethiopia and he built Ethiopian jazz, bringing together the pentatonic scales of Ethiopian music with the kind of chordal approaches to jazz. He was building a
hyphenated hybrid sound that was incredibly African. I mean, jazz is already African, right.
Right, right right, yeah, it was.
It was like it for me, like I love and found my space in ethio jazz because like jazz as this black music as a music born rooted in black
communities and an experience of a forced migration. And then Mulatasatke migrates to the United States, absorbs this, collaborates, learns about it, with reverence and respect and this real depth and then migrates back to Ethiopia and then me as a refugee coming to the United States, like I found my space in Ethiopian jazz to be like deeply, deeply rooted as a black person in America while being able to hold on to express, evolve and can remain connected
to my Ethiopian nests and my Ethiopian sounds.
Oh my god, such a vibe. I love this so much. And you know, because oftentimes I feel like artists, all different types of artists, whether it's musicians or you know, visual artists, call there's you know, chefs paining. You know, the realm poets are the ones that can better tell
our stories. And I wonder some of the stories that have come up, you know, in your pod and in Movement now that it's grown into you know, a live show, what are some of the stories that you can share with us to kind of you know, whatet our appetites for for your show, but also what surprised you that you learned?
Well, first of all, you know, when we started making Movement as a live show, what we really discovered and what we really wanted to honor is that you know, immigrant communities are not the same in every space that you go to, and so we actually remake our live show. We remake half the live show to be local to the place that we go. So half the show is my songs and stories, and then half the show is local to the spaces that we go to. On October twenty eighth, will be in la and will be featuring
Choum Nimo, who is an incredible Cambodian vocalist. She's actually telling the story of her of a song called twenty two Nights, which was based on a time when she was where she was detained by border control in an ice facility with other women and had this incredible experience though connecting with women from all over the globe and
then wrote music based on that. We're also working with Clarissa Bitar, a beautiful Queer Palestinian ood virtuoso who like shines her the spirit of her community through this virtuosic ood playing, as well as a singer called Sancha who is a Mexican American singer who grew up in the queer communities and the and the drag communities of the
San Francisco Bay Area. Specifically and then found her home in Los Angeles, and she is just an incredible songwriter grounded in Rancherira music, and it has reclaimed Rancheria as her own. What has really surprised me is how how important intimate storytelling is. I once heard someone say that the more specific you get, the more universal you are. So we are like taking this very, very very you know, almost a microscopic look at people's lives. We're thinking about
brothers and sisters and aunties and uncles. We're thinking about an instrument that was hung in a home for an entire life and then finding the stories that resonate out of that. We're thinking about the ways that people and communities surprise you. You know. Sancha tells an incredible story of just being welcomed by what might from the outside look like a very conservative community in Mexico, but then finding her home as a queer person able to claim
her tradition music from that space. And so we're what we're finding is that when you get to this intimate, intimate level, you can really explore these large scale issues in ways that are just people living their lives and you laugh, you like you dance you know, I'm always talking about the ways that music is like this ancient technology that we have for bringing people together. You know, there's this thing called entrainment. So when you listen to music,
your brain waves they synchronize to the rhythm. And that means that everyone in an audience like think whatever you want about that music. Think it's strange, think it's new, think it's incredible. It actually doesn't matter. Your brain is responding to that, Your heartbeat is responding to the music. When people sing together, they breathe together. This is like an ancient technology that we have for bringing people together.
And these are the spaces that we need to create, spaces where we can be surprised, where we can be like taken from a space of like reflection to joy, where you want to dance, where you want to sing together, and then you want to just you know, you want to reflect on the world differently. And so that's why we do what we do, and every show is a surprise because it is local to the place that we go.
You know, I think now in particular about how much music is needed, right, like I think about trying to make sense of the world we are living in. Right, everything has been. I don't care where you are, right, it's been utterly disrupted, like the reality, the norms that we that we knew, everything has been utterly disrupted, and it's really hard, I think, for our brains to make
sense of it. What do you think it is? You know, and you described it a bit about the wavelengths and the and the shared vibrations that you have with music, But what do you think it is about art and in the importance of it in times of crisis, in times of deep trauma, to really remind people of our shared humanity.
You're absolutely right, we do need art to remind us of our shared humanity. I think that, you know, I have a lot of answers to this question, and some of them come from my heart, and some of them come from my mind, and some of them come from the places that I've stored trauma in my own body. But what I think the most basic thing is that we are in this for the long haul. We have
got to have the medicine. We have got to have the medicine in the struggle, because if we don't have that, like we actually like, we're not going to be able to keep showing up for each other. As an artist, what's really important for me is the simple act of singing is an act of connecting to my own body. And as I practice, I've learned that I have a practice where when I sing, Oh, okay, now I'm gonna resonate the sound in my cheekbones. Now I'm going to
resonate it in my heart. Now I'm gonna let it go all the way down into the bottom of my lungs. And you know, in Chinese medicine they say that the lungs are the place where you store grief, where you process grief. Okay, now I'm gonna let the sound resonate in there for a while. And so for me, it is literally my medicine where I check in with myself, where I connect with my body. That can happen. You don't have to be a singer for that to happen. You can do it through dance, You can do it
through listening. You could, but an attentive listening, you know, not a background music. But yeah, let it wash over you and you let it. You let yourself res with it, you know, because there's this funny thing where Okay, the air in our lungs is like have you ever felt the base in your chest? Have you ever felt have you ever like listened to base and you feel it like.
A big base, like yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
That's the air and the space in your body. The air you know, sound waves travel through air. Okay, there's air in your lungs. When when that base frequency hits your lungs, where there's the air and your lungs resonating, like this is how we get to our bodies. And so it's both like the medicine for when I'm feeling in crisis and trauma. It's how I remember that I am here and that I can ground to my physical being. I can say, Okay, in this moment, I am safe,
I'm in this room. Now what can I do now? What can I do now? How can I reach out? And so for me, it's about the long haul. Musicians are natural storytellers, you know, we need storytellers in the spaces that we are trying to build a better world together. We are all storytellers. Actually would look at anybody like I see the stories that are inside of them. So these are tools that we have to keep going to be the medicine for ourselves and for each other.
I love it. When you said medicine and the struggle, for so long I have been looking for the bomb, you know what I'm saying for the wound, right, Like I often talk about where we are in this certain in this climate, which is that we are just a bunch of open wounds walking around that have not excavated the cause, right, and we just keep bumping into each other, bumping into each other. We need to clean it out
in order to heal it. And there needs to be a bomb, a soothing for it, right Otherwise like we just were always going to be reacting. We can never get to a place of creating because we're in consistent pain. So when you said medicine and the struggle, I'm like, yes, yes, yes, Yes.
Actually wrote a whole album for that. It's like, oh, people need a ball, but you know, and it's also to share it that we're not alone in it.
Yeah. What what do you want folks, you know, to take away from movement? Like when they you know, when they connect and they are able to see it in person when they listen to the pod, Like, what do you want people to take away?
I mean there's so many things. One is that the sound of a radically diverse world is bumping. The soundtrack is bumping, and like and so, and learning about other people's cultures is a way that we get to experience that that has joy and so celebration and communal, communal spaces in it. Even as we are in this state of crisis, we don't want to disconnect. I don't want
to disconnect from my capacity for joy. I don't want to Yes, every time I sing, I can connect to my capacity for joy, every time I hear music, I can connect to that. I want people to, you know, have an understanding that immigrants, migrants and refugees are like wildly creative people who are contributing so much culturally. And
I want folks to understand that. You know, the ways that we are open to each other, the ways that we are curious about each other, the ways that we approach each other with question rather than and I don't mean like judgmental question, but like genuine curiosity rather than judgment opens up the stories inside of all of us.
And that space can be a space where we can find solutions and where we can find ways of advocating for each other across struggles as well and looking at intersectionality is really important for us as well.
Beautiful. So you said November twenty eighth is where? Hey, what do you say?
October twenty Hey?
October okay? October twenty eighth, you are in.
La Yes, Yes, at the new Nimoy Theater at UCLA.
Okay, And then how can people stay connected? Find the dates of where you're going to be? When do you ever come to the East coast? Do you ever come to the East Coast?
Yes? We did a live show at Lincoln Center in March in New York. We'll be back, don't worry. And we're going to Washington, d C. To the DMV area. We'll be in Silver Spring, Maryland at Montgomery College on February fifteenth for the live show as well. And of course you can get the podcast anywhere you listen to podcasts Movement with macleadero, and you can stay in touch
with me, you know. Okay. So I'm based in San Francisco, And even if you forget my name, if you google Ethiopian singer San Francisco's right.
I love that, like I'm at the top of the list. I am the list lickly.
It was.
It's such a pleasure to meet you. I'm so grateful for the work that you're doing, for the inspiration that you're providing, for the art that you're bringing in to the world. Because yeah, we and especially especially in times of pain, in times of prices, in trauma, we cannot forget our joy and we cannot forget our shared humanity. And music is a wonderful, wonderful balmb So, thank you so much for making me time.
Thank you so much for having me. It's been such a pleasure.
M That is it for me today. Dear friends on woke f as always, power to the people and to all the people power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.