Website: http://www.meklithadero.com

If Joni Mitchell were East African and met Nina Simone for tea in San Francisco’s Mission District, she might end up sounding like Meklit Hadero. Meklit is a true modern global artist: born in Ethiopia, raised in US and nurtured for the last several years in San Francisco’s richly diverse arts scene. Add in a warm and luminous singing voice and lyrical songwriting that moves from the starkly personal to the poetically metaphoric, and you have her entrancing debut full-length recording, “On a Day Like This…”, to be released by Porto Franco Records on April 20th, 2010.

While Meklit’s music is like a sponge soaking up influences from all over the world, in some ways she’s the perfect embodiment of the City by the Bay – cosmopolitan, striking and worldly, with an outlook that seems to change every few blocks or so. In fact, it’s tempting to tag Meklit and “On a Day Like This…” – with its jazzy but expansive vibe, moods that veer from the hushed to the impassioned, and a female voice so lushly spellbinding it draws you into its world – as San Francisco’s answer to Norah Jones.

Meklit is a TED Global Fellow, the founder of the Arba Minch Collective, and a resident artist at the Red Poppy Art House in San Francisco. She has played at venues such as Cafe Du Nord, the Independent, the Great American Music Hall, the Bottom of the Hill, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.