Miriam Elhajli, Folk Musician And Musicologist, Plays Duck Creek

This Saturday evening, Miriam Elhajli will be playing — with Lau Noah on guitar and Victor Campbell on piano — at the Arts Center at Duck Creek, as part of the 2022 Music Series, curated by composer and trombonist Kalia Vandever. Elhajli’s music draws from many points of inspiration across space and time, but her work is singularly hers, with knowing richness and depth.

The program will feature new compositions; songs from Elhajli’s sophomore album “The Uncertainty of Signs,” released earlier this year; as well as folk music. Elhajli is a folk singer, composer-improviser, and musicologist based in New York City. Music has been part of her life since she was a child.

“My mother is from Venezuela, from Caracas, and I spent my childhood there and a lot of summers singing with my grandmother and singing with my family and others,” Elhajli described. “So folk music, traditional music has always played a really big role in my life. I also grew up a lot of my life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I heard a lot of Irish and British and Scottish folk music, hanging at the pubs as a child … And just with street musicians [too]. So I grew up listening to a lot of that and it all sort of found its way into my heart.”

Now, Elhajli works at The Association for Cultural Equity (ACE) as a researcher. Founded by Alan Lomax, ACE is an archive and nonprofit dedicated to exploring and preserving music, dance and oral traditions. ACE works to keep alive a diversity of cultural heritage, and Lomax traveled the world recording, archiving and disseminating different cultural forms.

“All the records in the archive sort of fed my curiosity and my heart,” Elhajli said. “I was just really following the sounds that to me felt authentic and heartfelt and honest with the sentiment of the people, of the moment. I’m always drawn toward whatever feels vibrant and it doesn’t matter the idiom of music, it just matters how alive it feels to me.”

One project Elhajli has worked on is collecting and curating music from the African and Afro-indigenous diasporas in South America.

Elhajli released her debut LP, “Observations” in 2020, on the independent label she founded, Numina Records — learning the ins and outs of production all the way up until pressing vinyl. Her most recent effort, “The Uncertainty of Signs,” came out earlier this year, and she’s at work on new music. Numina, the plural form of numen, comes from the Latin term for divinity.

“To me, music is that,” Elhajli said, of the label’s name. “It is alive. It is numinous and has a capacity for expanding human consciousness.”

Like Lomax, Elhajli has goals of traveling the world and documenting creativity and culture.

“It was the intention to record people that very much exist on the outskirts, because I still very much consider myself an underground musician,” Elhajli said, of her label’s goals “… I do everything myself. And so I exist very much on the outskirts, but I think there is so much brilliance in those musicians and artists and poets and painters that just sort of exist on the fringe and [want] to give them an opportunity to document their work … So my intention was to record the street musician on the corner that’s brilliant but will never have the organization skills to get into the studio.”

Elhajli’s performance at Duck Creek will involve improvisation, an important part of her creative process.

“I’m just trying to be guided by the upper hand, the intuition, not necessarily the mind, which is quite deceptive,” Elhajli said. “That requires flexibility and to resume the shape of water and to improvise and be spontaneous. I think the music is an extension of the way in which you live your life. It’s not outside of it, it’s a reflection. And it’s sort of the fumes. So I’m trying to focus on the life lived and then the music will just sort of be the fumes.”

Elhajli also spoke of the importance of supporting musicians and independent musicians in particular.

“We’re trying to be messengers and extract experience, extract what’s going on and what we see around us and deliver it,” she said. “I just think we need to keep going to live performances and engaging with these questions of what the hell we’re doing.”

Miriam Elhajli performs at 5 p.m. on Saturday, August 6, at the Arts Center at Duck Creek, 127 Squaw Road, Springs. Admission is free, but ticket reservations are recommended at duckcreekarts.org. For more information on Miriam Elhajli, visit miriamelhajli.com or purchase her music at miriamelhajli.bandcamp.com.