Why would a singer need to find her voice? Well, think of your voice not just as something you use for singing or speaking. Your voice can also be your role in your community. Your voice can be your opinion or a position about something important to you. You voice can be a talent or a gift that you have to share with the world, something that will make this world a better place. Through Finding My Voice, I have set-off to discover these parts of my voice and bring them all into my music.
The project began with trip to Israel to meet composer, pianist, and singer Idan Raichel. He is an artist who has become an idol of sorts for me because I share the same desire to be “an ambassador representing a world of hope in which artistic collaboration breaks down barriers between people of different backgrounds and beliefs.” How better to learn to do something, then to ask someone who is already doing it.
I left Brazil in September 2018 and stopped first in Addis Ababa. Ethiopia is a country whose culture and music have always intrigued me. For three weeks, I met and sang with local musicians in venues throughout Ethiopia’s capital city. Traveling on to Tel Aviv, I spent two months making a new home in Israel, meeting local musicians, listening and learning about the mixing of traditions from the Jewish Diaspora with Middle Eastern music. At the end of my time in Israel, I met my idol Idan Raichel who generously shared his thoughts about creating music and a fabulous idea to create small documentaries about me collaborating with artists in different countries.
With this idea in mind, I invited a musician I had met in Addis Ababa to come to Brazil during Carnival so that we could see what blending traditional Ethiopian music with Brazilian music and Jazz would sound like. That collaboration became the first episodes of a web series called “Wherever There Is Music” and inspired both us to create a way to explore collaborations between our countries on a bigger scale. That idea has become the “Brazil Meets Ethiopia: An Interactive-Experimental Cultural Exchange”.
Finding My Voice has become the compass for my work as a singer/artist. Through it, I will continue to create projects that allow me to explore an expand my definitions of self, my identity, my art. And through the music that comes from all this, I will continue to share my discoveries with you and with the world .