Saturday's Internet Edition, May 17, 2008.
Regional Arts Festival Bringing Music To The Brock
|
Another definition: arts across the Piedmont.
A regional arts festival will come to Mocksville Saturday night at 7 at the Brock Performing Arts Center, putting local blues musician Mel Jones and his band on stage with Winston-Salem based jazz trumpeter Joe Robinson.
“The whole idea is for two artists from different genres and different counties to collaborate on a single project,” Jones said.
He and Robinson are both members of Carolina Music Ways, which promotes traditional regional music such as the blues, bluegrass, jazz and gospel.
Regional arts are important to economic development, and Bricolage is trying to promote that, Jones said.
“Its about developing artistic resources in the region,” he said. “Not every county got an event.
“These artists are right under our feet,” he said, adding that jazz and blues have a deep history in the Piedmont. Around the tobacco markets from the early 1900s well into the 1930s, the musicians would hang out around the tobacco warehouses with hats on the ground. It was one of their greatest paydays.”
These musicians would follow the tobacco markets from region to region, state to state.
Jones saw some remnants of that way of making money in the 1960s.
“The heritage is right here under us.”
Jones and Danny Wicker have won the Charlotte Acoustic Blues contest two of the past three years, and were first at Merle Fest in 2005.
He’s written a new “field holler” called “The Dirt Don’t Care” he plans to sing Saturday night.
Jones and Robinson will play separately, and together, along with their bands. More than 10 musicians will be on the stage at one time.
Tickets are available at the Brock box office on North Main Street.. Learn more at the website www.bricolageartsfestival.org ... subscribe to the Davie County Enterprise Record, P.O. Box 99, Mocksville, N.C. 27028.