the dotmatrix project

Alice Gerrard joins past DMP performer Laurelyn Dossett and Diana Jones for a short series of concerts December through February, 2010.

Inspired by the “In the Round” sessions at the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, these award-winning writers will perform together and take turns singing songs and telling the stories behind them.

7:30 pm December 9
EMFfringe at Triad Stage
Tickets: $20. Order online.

More dates are scheduled for December and February.

Alice Gerrard is a talent of legendary status. In a career spanning some 40 years, she has known, learned from, and performed with many of the old-time and bluegrass greats, especially her groundbreaking collaboration with Appalachian singer Hazel Dickens during the 1960s and 70s. The duo produced four classic LPs (reissued by Rounder and Smithsonian Folkways on CD) and influenced scores of young women singers. Alice in turn, has earned worldwide respect for her own important contributions to the music as a singer and songwriter, as the founder of the Old-Time Herald magazine, for her advocacy of traditional music, and for the work she has done with traditional music as a musician, record producer, and documentor. It all started when the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music changed her life back in 1959…she’s been writing new chapters ever since.

Diana Jones‘ songwriting has a powerful connection to the sounds of old-time Appalachia. One of her songs, “Henry Russell’s Last Words,” has been recorded by Joan Baez, while another, “If I Had a Gun,” has been recorded by Gretchen Peters. Diana’s own versions of those songs can be heard on her new album, released on Proper Records, “Better Times Will Come,” an ambitious effort that consolidates and extends the leap forward of her previous recordings. According to the New York Times “…Better Times Will Come, her unvarnished new album, marks both the culmination of this process and the arrival of a fresh and distinctive voice….She sings of the hard times, murderous urges and chilling loneliness that haunt the old Anglo-Celtic ballads but, with one exception, sets her plain-spoken narratives resolutely in the present…”

Songwriter Laurelyn Dossett lives and writes in the Piedmont of North Carolina, and her songs tend to reflect the stories of the region, both traditional and contemporary. One of the most sought-after voices in creative collaborations, she co-founded Polecat Creek with singing partner Kari Sickenberger, and has partnered with playwright Preston Lane on four successful plays featuring regional folklore and original music. One of these songs, “Anna Lee” was featured on Levon Helm’s Grammy-winning record, Dirt Farmer. She is also a regular performer at regional music festivals such as Merlefest, a guest on the radio show Prairie Home Companion, and most recently, a writer and performer with the North Carolina Symphony. She is the 2009 recipient of the North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship for songwriting.

Photo by Stephen Charles

The exhibit… is up.

That was only a few months in the making.

This Friday night @ The Green Bean is the exhibit’s opening, featuring the music of past DMP performers: Laurelyn Dossett, Mr. Rozzi and Eating The Invaders. We’re also going to screen a slew of DMP music videos created by the ever talented All Aces Media, Ioannis Batsios, Jason Marc Pierce, Jennifer Graves, Bret Jones and Michael McQueen.

As far as the exhibit goes, we have 29 large format photographs on display, shot by 9 local photographers across 8 monthly shows, which will stay on the walls until September 27th.

Friday night, the entire month… it’s our way of both celebrating and promoting the talent found within our own community.

We do hope you can come out and enjoy it with us.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t introduce our featured photographers, so here they are:

DMP PHOTOGRAPHERS (These are the folk who signed up with us to shoot specific shows and then uploaded their high-res shots to the DMP flickr photostream under a Creative Commons license, which in turn furthers our mission)
		Kevin Belton flickr account Email | Voice: 336.816.8571 Kevin is a professional product photographer for the High Point furniture industry, second camera for John Leonard Photography for weddings and special events. He has been shooting themed based ideas in the last year or so featuring addiction, fashion, and music. Art is his passion and the camera is his medium.
		Stephen Charles CharlesMedia Photography Email | Voice: 336.682.9517 Stephen Charles began taking photographs in 1983 with a 35mm Canon Sure Shot. With the advent of Digital SLRs he has pursued photography as a growing passion, with a desire for letting candid captured moments tell the story.
		Jessi Hagood Jessi Hagood Photography Email Jessi Hagood is a native of Eden, NC and works primarily in the Greensboro area as a Wedding and Portrait Photographer. Recently her work has involved photographing Bodybuilding and Figure Competitions, soon to be featured in Muscle and Fitness Magazine and in an upcoming episode of MTV Made.
		Doug Klesch Doug Klesch Photography Email | Voice: 336.542.3071 Doug is a refugee from the cubicle farms of corporate America. Failing to have sapped all creative energy from him over more than a decade, his overlords released him back to the world. He gratefully returns wielding a camera.
		Elizabeth Lemon Elizabeth Lemon Photography Email | Voice: 719.244.3518 A recent graduate from the photography program at Randolph Community College, Elizabeth is adjusting to life outside a classroom. She is pursuing fine art and documentary photography with rediscovered inspiration and a tool box of new knowledge.
		Alex Maness Alex Maness Photography Email | Voice: 336.707.6121 Alex Maness, local boy done good, likes to travel and explore, but keeps Greensboro, NC as his center of gravity. He runs a photography business shooting for magazines and advertisers, as well as his own documentary projects.
		Mark Smith flickr account Email | Voice: 336.414.4721 Mark’s first inkling that photography could be fun was when his parents brought out the dreaded slides of their jaunts overseas. Once Mark could afford it, he bought a Pentax ME Super and “that was that.” These days, Mark happily takes sports and beach pictures as well as the live music events at DMP.
COMMUNITY PHOTOGRAPHERS (Talented, local photogs who came out to shows and documented the evening)
		Carolyn de Berry Carolyn de Berry Photography | Email Monkeywhale Productions | Email A Connecticut native and graduate of Guilford College and the Commercial Photography Program at Randolph Community College, Carolyn is a freelance photographer and assistant living in Greensboro, NC. She is also the production photographer and studio manager for Monkeywhale Productions.
		Allen Martin MartiniVision Email | Voice: 917.687.1912 Greensboro native Allen Martin is a photographer and designer who has recently relocated back to his home town after 18 years in NYC. A camera owner since adolescence, for the last several years Allen has focused on fashion, fine art and entertainment photography.

SPECIAL THANKS TO:

• Katie Southard, Owner of The Green Bean
• Elizabeth Lemon, for matting, framing and curating the show
• Laurelyn Dossett, Mr. Rozzi and Eating The Invaders, for generously donating their talent at the exhibit opening
• Don Ravon for running sound at the exhibit opening
• Don Ravon & Dan Bayer for mixing the music video tracks
• Ioannis Batsios, Blake Faucette, Michael McQueen and Bret Jones for scrambling to produce their music videos on time
• Andy Coon for helping prep the music video DVD
• Allen Martin for the beautiful show poster
• All of our talented photographers, many of whom aren’t represented in this show. You can see their all of their work at our flickr spot

A SUPER SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR FRAME SPONSORS:

• Mark Wagoner Productions
  Email | Voice: 888.854.0406
• 243 Framing
  243 E. Salisbury St., Asheboro, NC. 27203
  336.629.5101
• Martin’s Frame and Art
  336.274.2426

Yes, the DMP is about putting on shows.

We’ve packed the house many a night while exposing the talents of kick ass local musicians playing their originals — no matter the perceived popularity or status of the act, we get them on. Within this process, we’ve also been able to create participatory opportunities for local photographers and film makers and sound engineers to do what they do best; documenting and crafting the world around them in ways that only they can.

While music is absolutely where the heart of the project lies, as the people come out first and foremost to both hear and see the musicians cut loose, the active involvement of the media crew does serve as an experience layer of both professionalism and intrigue to our audiences.

It really is something different.

Once the stage is broken down and the crowd goes home, the documentation of the evening’s performance serves as a memory seal of sorts, keeping the freshness of the night intact for all to experience down the road. And whether a music video is discovered by a teenager surfing YouTube on South Elm Street or a lawyer who stumbles across a sick shot while accessing flickr at his flat in the UK, the talent within a small venue in a small town receives the legs for global discovery.

Photo by Elizabeth Lemon

As exciting as the concept of documentation and exposure might seem when community begins to form around artists, such a degree of community still only speaks to a linear exchange of bytes and bits across the web. Or to be metaphorical, similar to the download of experience from performer to audience.

Now, what if the audience could join in on the performance itself?

With the current advancement of this internet — where “2.0″ has already become a ubiquitous descriptor for the sharing and re-contextualizing of data across brands — and with access to media creation tools at an all-time high, such a binary metaphor as above only serves as a first definition of “community” within a netizen-driven dictionary that’s still being written.

So where to next?

Creative Building Blocks

The most interesting angle of this project, as far as I’m concerned, is the potential for building community (i.e. fans, interest, attention, etc.) around these amazingly talented creators in ways that you or I would never even dream of. That said, my interest isn’t in defining how that community forms or ensuring that the building occurs in a specific way… or even at all.

We make DMP media available at specific spots around the web for download, but our control ends with that point of accessibility.

By licensing all of our work under a Creative Commons (CC) license — one that allows non-commercial share-alike reuse and remixing with attribution — DMP participants are continuously contributing creative material, with structured data of attribution, location and subject matter, to the commons; material that is optimized for discovery (check out the results for a “greensboro music” search on flickr), to then be enjoyed and potentially shared and/or re-purposed out of a person’s connection with both the media and its subject matter.

If you’re not familiar with Creative Commons, this short video will fill in the gaps:

Essentially, we’ve designed the parameters of our project to allow 16-year old Billy Nelson in Austin, Texas to mashup a track by The Bronzed Chorus with one by Laurelyn Dossett, while using DMP show pictures to use as b-roll for the music video.

Now will that exact scenario ever happen? I don’t know. But why on Earth would we want to license against such creativity, especially when the newly crafted creative work would point more people in the direction of the original musicians and photographers involved in the piece?

I want to welcome a “Billy” with open arms into the DMP collective without even a hint of stodginess or protectionism. The same goes to a blogger who embeds our media in a post to expose the talent of the artists involved.

As a result of such an open approach, we have two primary rules for participating with DMP:

1. All media (photographs, recordings, music videos) must be made available somewhere online — in high-resolution form, downloadable and for free
2. All media must be licensed with the aforementioned CC terms to define usage rights and to protect our creators’ rights

This doesn’t toss out the right of the media creator or band to sell their work, but it does give the rest of the world the ability to share the work within different contexts.

And The Audience Goes *Snap!*

Some people — especially those who have have made a living shooting over the years — tend to find these two rules to be game stoppers of sorts. They consider everything they shoot to be a monetized effort, so there isn’t much middle ground when it comes to redefining copyright, freeing up access, etc… which is actually ok.

We’re more than happy to see photographers who hold these beliefs come out to shoot shows without participating in the upload part of the project. We consider them to be “audience plus” — music lovers and media creators who are benefiting themselves and everyone involved. While we can’t include them in on the promotional perks that participating photogs enjoy, we welcome them just the same.

As a matter of fact, we encourage everyone at a show with a cell phone to a DSLR to participate and spread the media love within their own networks. We want as many people as possible shooting and uploading to the web, making it clear that Greensboro has a music scene to check out.

Because, in the end, what else do we have but the communities that we are a part of?

Read this list of folks right here, and see if “singer/songwriter” comes to mind:

Johnny Cash
Bob Dylan
Neil Young
John Denver
James Hetfield
Joni Mitchell
Carly Simon
Tori Amos
Ray LaMontagne
Laurelyn Dossett
Matty Sheets
Conor Oberst
Ani Defranco
Amy Winehouse
Harry Chapin
James Marshall Owen
Scott Avett
Lily Allen
Ryan Adams
Jeff Tweedy
Dan Fogelberg
Dolly Parton

For me, there’s a few in there where the phrase singer/songwriter sticks out to me like a black turtleneck sweater.

John Denver. Joni Mitchell. Cat Stevens.

The others, not so much. But I found most on a wiki list of singer/songwriters.

Johnny Cash? Come on. Singer/songwriters don’t flip the bird at Columbia Records.

They whine about it.

And that’s the basically the idea I’ve been carrying around about the singer/songwriter genre for a few years now.

The switch flipped a few years back. Precisely the moment when, sitting in the home studio office of an LA-based music producer, the man said in a very kind, very matter-of-fact way, something like, “We’ll try and make your songs sound a little less singer/songwriter.”

My brain did something like:

Singer/Songwriter: Bad
Metallica: Good (for your reference)

And for the last two years, I’ve tried shaking the term off like, well, a tight black turtleneck, throwing as many musicians and arrangements and Garage Band beats as I could at songs to take them out of the coffee shop and into the coliseum.

I wanted my songs to flip you the bird. Not sing about them.

Dammit.

Recorded a bunch of songs in a studio with some fine musicians. And when I heard the playback the first few times, realized the songs I’d worked so hard to write, were now so far away from the original purpose, far from anything I could ever duplicate live.

Far from tunes that literally stood naked in front of you. Not the first blush of love, naked, when everything sounds like a pop song, new, and not yet overplayed. The naked-in-the-bright-light, when every thing about the person is real with flaws and missteps and wrong notes. That kind of naked.

Being naked in front of people takes a lot more courage than flipping somebody the bird.

So I took the term, singer/songwriter, back.

Took off the black turtleneck.

Realized again it takes a kind of unordinary courage to be a singer/songwriter.

Where you have to sing the notes – not scream – into the mic.

Where melody can’t hide inside some refrigerator-sized amplifier.

Where the singer, songwriter alone has to fill the room.

That unordinary courage is what you’ll see this week at the dotmatrix project with the singer songwriter performances of Kristen Leigh, Morgan McPherson and Randy Furches.

Authentic, real and naked.

Dress appropriately.

Live at the dotmatrix project
Thursday, June 25
at the Green Burro

Flowers from the farmer’s market. Fresh strawberries. A walk in the park. Mama likes to buy local, doesn’t she? How about some fresh local music. We’ve got a few finds and featured artists in the Dotmatrix Project archives with live albums that you can listen to on LastFm, or purchase from Amie Street. And if the live album isn’t ready yet, go ahead and support a local artist and buy it straight from the source.

Your mama would be proud.

Laurelyn Dossett

Aside from her soft soprano and storyteller lyrics, Laurelyn is a mama herself. She raised her 3 young babies until they could get around on their own and then started taking guitar lessons. A student of Greensboro’s own Scott Manring at String Studios, Laurelyn’s music career has taken her far beyond the typical musician’s music career. This month she’ll tour with the North Carolina Symphony; visit Prairie Home Companion with singing partner (and a mother, too) Kari Sickenberger. And next summer she’ll premier a fourth music and play collaboration with Triad Stage’s Preston Lane. Her live show performance at the Dotmatrix Project captures Dossett’s love for North Carolina folklore and captivating songwriting.

Laurelyn Dossett, Live at the Dotmatrix Project on LastFm
Download the album on Amie Street
Or check out her new album, Stages

Jim Avett

Don’t let anybody fool you. Jim Avett was a singer and songwriter long before his boys ever broke a banjo string. The classic country music lover is a fool for a good gospel or country song and spends most of his time these days schooling young musicians on the finer phrases of the craft, passing it on by singing lines and picking melodies from Tom T. Hall and Merle Haggard tunes. Most of the tunes from Jim’s live performance at the Dotmatrix Project won’t go up online due to copyright issues (who wants to piss off Merle Haggard? Seriously). But he does have a gospel album recently released through Ramseur Records that features a few members of his family.

Jim Avett and Family

Rhiannon Giddens

For a young woman, the Greensboro-based musician knows a lot of old songs. The Oberlin trained singer traded in the arias for a banjo and fiddle to form the Carolina Chocolate Drops. The world-touring troupe is an African American string band – a style established here in the Piedmont region. Still, Giddens is a modern woman, too, and is stretching her songwriting skills into a new era: her own. Her Dotmatrix Project album captures the new and the old. The album isn’t ready yet, but you can prime your dear mother’s ears with the next best thing – a Rhiannon Giddens album.

Rhiannon’s album is still in the works (she’s been on tour) but you can hear some of her tracks on Laurelyn’s album
Rhiannon Giddens

Bruce Piephoff

You really can’t talk local music without mentioning Bruce Piephoff. The singer songwriter performed with an impressive line up of musicians for his Dotmatrix Project performance, featuring fiddles, stand up bass, accordions and Filthybird’s lead singer and primary songwriter Renee Mendoza. His live performance isn’t up on Last Fm yet, but Bruce’s prolific career can be heard on his new album, The Chestnut Tree – his 16th – from Flyin’ Cloud Records.

Bruce’s live show isn’t yet available
Bruce Piephoff

The Old Stone Revue

If your mama still likes to yell “Free Bird” at live concerts, this album is for her. Here’s what Last Fm has to say about these boys: “New Grass and Roots music has gained worldwide acclaim in the last decade — from the back porches, to the Ryman Auditorium, Americana is stronger than ever. The Old Stone Revue was formed to carry on the tradition of singer songwriting but not feeling confined to the boundaries of traditional bluegrass and country music. With influences from John Prine, Johnny Cash, and Del McCoury, to Jazz Is Dead, and Gram Parsons, The Old Stone Revue mix traditional bluegrass with country, rock, and soul.”

The Old Stone Revue, Live at the Dotmatrix Project on LastFm
Purchase the live recording on Amie Street
The Old Stone Revue

DMP veterans, Laurelyn Dossett and Scott “Scooter” Manring (my genius guitar teacher) stop on by the kitchen to make lovely music for Harvey and Carolyn.

Greensboro musicians really are special.

Save the monkeywhale.

A timely, beautiful tune, living out in a small city in North Carolina during a deep recession.

MUSIC VIDEO CREDITS
Editor: Jennifer Graves
Camera: Jason Marc Pierce
Camera: Bret Jones
Camera: Jennifer Graves
Sound: Danny Bayer
Sound: Don Ravon
Video Producer: Matt Williams

If you enjoyed the video, the Amie Street live album is currently available for $1.98. If you’re new to the AS process, be sure to use our promo entrance page to sign up for an account and receive free money to support our local artists by putting coin directly in their pockets.

You can also listen to the entire show, including prelude stories to songs, for free over at Last.fm.

Enjoy!

Laurelyn’s Anna Lee received fame when it was recorded by Levon Helm on his Grammy Award winning album, Dirt Farmer. Two very different sounding versions. We’re obviously biased here in Greensboro.

MUSIC VIDEO CREDITS
Editor: Jason Marc Pierce
Camera: Jennifer Graves
Camera: Bret Jones
Camera: Jason Marc Pierce
Sound: Danny Bayer
Sound: Don Ravon
Video Producer: Matt Williams

If you loved that, the Amie Street album is currently available for $1.98. If you’re new to the AS process, be sure to use our promo entrance page to sign up for an account and receive free money to support our local artists by putting coin directly in their pockets.

Oh yeah, you can also listen to the entire show, including prelude stories to songs, for free over at Last.fm.

Enjoy!

Local music doesn’t get much better than what Laurelyn Dossett has to offer. Tales of love, tragedy, triumph — Laurelyn’s storytelling and angelic voice grabs a hold of your soul and refuses to let go. DMP is proud to release Laurelyn Dossett Live at the dotmatrix project.

The beautiful cover shot was captured by the immensely talented John Leonard.

The Amie Street album is currently available for $1.98, but will undoubtedly be jumping in price soon, as it’s already gotten a few Recs. If you’re new to that process, be sure to use our promo entrance page to sign up for an account and receive free money to support our local artists by putting coin directly in their pockets.

You can listen to the entire show, chock full of bonus prelude cuts over at Last.fm for free.

ALBUM CREDITS
Recording Engineers: Don Ravon, Dan Bayer
Mixing Engineers: Don Ravon, Dan Bayer
Cover Design: Sean Coon
Cover Photograph: John Leonard

Laurelyn brought it that night.

Check out John Leonard Photography for more of John’s work.