The Arts Council - Thanks So Much for a Wonderful Evening!!

This is a short post my friends - not because tonight's Arts Council of the Blue Ridge Annual Meeting wasn't something worthy of a long post, but because I am just too awed for words. If you are a Roanoker and into the whole love-affair of our area's Arts presence, then you will appreciate this short and sweet entry.

First of all, I am a newbie Arts Council member. I belonged to my hometown's Council years ago in Elizabeth, NJ. We were not exactly bursting with members and programs. (I am still friends with one fellow who is a world-class 6-string Contra Bass player, a member and son of musicians/ artists, his mother being one of the leaders of the Elizabeth Arts Council. In fact, he will be performing here at the Taubman this coming Sunday. I will give details at the end of my post.)

Anyway, as a member to the Arts Council here, I went by invitation to its Annual Meeting and experienced a history lesson of this organization by one of its founding members: Ms Carol Bewley Dalhouse, the Arts Council's first Executive Director. She was the Guest Speaker for the meeting tonight held at the Eleanor D Wilson Museum at Hollins University. What a heart-warming story she told! And it was a real treat to hear it from the person who did so much to make this Arts Council a reality today. One of the amazing things I learned was how in its early days, they felt they had no choice but to return an initial grant of funds because trying to get matching donations took them away from the Council's real mission.

I met and chatted afterwards with some of the wonderful people on the Council's staff and made my way over to the special exposition of Artist Betty Branch: "Through The Crow's Eye, a Retrospective." Her work is currently on display at the Eleanor D Wilson Museum, as well as throughout Roanoke and beyond. (You can find more information about Ms Branch's sculptures and drawings - including videos - on her website http://www.bettybranch.com/. The artist has a Roanoke studio you may visit by appointment. The Betty Branch Sculpture Studio and Gallery is located in the Historic Warehouse District in Roanoke, Virginia at 123 Norfolk Avenue.)

Scuplture of women's figures, crows, a variety of media including fire - I took my time walking through the museum in amazement. I can't remember the last time I was so moved to stare so long at an artist's creations. I wondered what her mind was telling her hands - or was it her heart speaking, or an other-worldly breath? I was also intrigued by the combination of the two subjects. Could it be one theme? Indeed, sculptures of the female form/ female rites of passage (see Biographical Notes on her website) interspersed with sculptures of crows. The soft and the hard; the blunt and the sharp; the curved and the angled... those are just the visual contrasts. It seemed somehow perfect to me in the same room.

Well, I lied. This is not a short blog post after all. Therefore, let me finish by saying that my friends Denise Jordan Finley and Daniel Pagdon, singer-songwriters, will be performing at the Taubman this Sunday at 1pm. Perhaps I can see a woman-crow combination in their musical partnering now that I may never be able to shake that concept... Hmmm.

(Photos of Betty Branch's work are from her website, http://www.bettybranch.com/ and if there are any objections to embedding them here, please contact me and I will humbly comply with your request to remove them.)

Taubman Museum's First Annual "Battle of the Bands"

Man, this was an event!! The new Taubman Museum of Art really means ALL Art, even the performance kind. They have been presenting a variety of shows and exhibits indoors at the Museum and outdoors Downtown. One would normally expect a musem to be an inside adventure with paintings, photography, sculptures, and other exhibits of artwork. But definitey not this past Saturday.

I wish I could be everywhere around Roanoke filming things. And I do miss out on a lot of cool stuff. It's hard to keep up with the different events going on, especially in the summer. Some things slip by me... Luckily, I got tipped off by Facebook friend and band leader, Santiago Prada of Twelve O'Clock Knob. So I contacted the good people at the Taubman to ask if I could shoot their Battle of the Bands contest for the Star City FAME YouTube Channel.

The question arose whether SCF would be streaming the BOTB live. Unfortunately, my company was still in shopping-mode for a suitable live stream site. But at the last minute, my webmaster and I decided to choose a rather tech-integrated vendor and begin testing late Friday, just one day before the BOTB event. We did succeed in setting it up and running a live test demo. So off I went Saturday morning with the usual video gear plus additional equipment to attempt a broadcast of the show on a designated Star City FAME webpage. Alas, Roanoke WiFi would not reach behind the Taubman building. It took me a half hour to set up for the shoot, all the while connecting to any and every wireless signal that came up with a pulse and re-logging into the livestream site. I finally gave up and focused my full attention to the stage and filming. (Perhaps next time I should bring along 500 feet of Cat5 cable and ask to tap off the Museum's LAN/WAN... )

I knew I was in for a long day, so I brought 10 HDV tapes to cover the show. I used up six of them and documented every song by every band that played the BOTB. Though I started out setting up next to the PA mixing board some 70 feet away from the stage, I eventually drifted all the way to the front and off to the side only 5 feet away. Stage Sound granted me a line-out off the submixer. Thanks Stage Sound!! (They are my pro-audio supplier for SCF's music recording projects.) I tend to be a MacGiver of sorts, so I had signal converters and cables of every shape and size, including 65 feet of XLR mic cables which allowed for all the close-up camera work (eventually).

The BOTB was a big hit with the local bands and the audience. I had NO IDEA there were so many young and talented original acts here in Roanoke. In all, nineteen bands answered the call to enter the "battle" to try for a grand prize of $1000.

The show started at Noon, with Nancy and 2 Meteors opening things up, and ran until about 8pm. There was a nice variety of genres represented - rock, metal, reggae, hip-hop/DJ, country-rock, avant-guarde, power-pop, and what-not (because I really don't know what some of the newer forms are called these days). The winner for this First Annual event was a Christian Rock Band called Smoke and Mirrors. They didn't sound anything like the inside of any church I've been to... thank the Lord, haha!! I wanna know where they go on Sundays and I'll get my map out. (Yeah, I still use maps.)

After the winners and honorable mentions were announced, the audience shouted out for an encore by Smoke and Mirrors, which they humbly accepted. This took the event closer to 9pm - but it was soooo worth it! Even though my feet, back and neck were killing me from operating the camera, I loved every minute. The Taubman officials, Lisa Martin and Maria, and the staff of Norah's Cafe were wonderful to me, and I thank them deeply for saving my life with bottles of water and goodies. It was hellaciously hot and humid out there all day.

You'd think I would hit the shower and pass out after getting home, but I couldn't wait to roll back the tapes and begin transferring them to the editing computer. The audio quality suffered somewhat due to signal mis-matching, but overall the concert is nicely documented in HD widescreen format. Many of the bands have already contacted me through MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Therefore, I have since re-scheduled my regular business work to include editing BOTB tapes in the evening so these awesome guys and gals (the artists as well as their great fans) can re-live the moments in what looks to become a legendary annual event at the Taubman Museum of Art.

Here's a list of the bands that performed. Best wishes to them all in their musical journey!
•NANCY & 2 METEORS
•THE WAIT
•BLACK RAIN
•LEVI'S GENE POOL
•SMOKE N' MIRRORS
•HEAD OVER KILLS
•AMONG THE BRAVE
•THE AURORA OBSERVATORY
•GRASS MONKEY
•AFFLICTION KID
•COMMONPLACE
•THE ROYAL GREENS
•LAZY MAN DUB BAND
•ZULU WATU BAND
•THE PULLOUTS
•THE BASTARDS OF FATE
•CRAWLING THOUGH MUD WITH MACHINE GUNS
•TWELVE O'CLOCK KNOB
•THE SAD COBRAS

You can surf over to http://www.youtube.com/user/starcityfame to check out uploads of the BOTB.