s o u n d S T O R I E S

Crown the king: red takes black [A SHORT DOCUMENTARY]

Click clack clackity clack. For years, I wondered about the sounds spilling out of the Capital Pool Checkers Club one block from my apartment in DC. Turns out, it's the sound of grown men with names like The Razor, The Hammer, and the Pressure Man talking trash over heated games of checkers. This piece won the 2012 Third Coast International Audio Festival "Short Doc Challenge." The competition theme was neighbors. We had to embed three seconds of silence in the piece and feature a color in the title.

IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME: A LOOK AT BURNING MAN [A FEATURE]

The effigy that was burned at the end of the 2018 Burning Man, held annually in Black Rock City, Nevada. Photo by Scott London

Welcome home! This is how fellow burners greet each other upon arrival in the Nevadan Black Rock Desert for the larger-than-life experience and celebration of art, culture, love, and radical self-expression that is Burning Man. What started as a small renegade act on San Francisco’s Baker Beach in 1986 (burning a wooden man!) has blossomed into a fully functioning city where 70,000 people gather to escape modern society, or what’s referred to as “the default world.” In 2018, I sat down with one of Burning Man’s six founders, Michael Mikel, and their director of art and civic engagement, Kim Cook, to talk about the past and the future of Burning Man.

Fear [A POEM]

As part of the series NEA Literary Moments, I produced a number of short audio pieces excerpted from Endowment national initiatives like The Big Read, Poetry Out Loud, and also original content. Here’s an example of the latter featuring Northern Irish poet, Ciaran Carson, reading his poem, “Fear.” This series ran on SiriusXM and many pieces live on PRX and the NEA website.

PATTY SMITH SINGS THE BLUES [A PODCAST]

Patty dons her All-American hat. Photo by Adam Kampe.

Born in Mississippi and raised in Pennsylvania, for years Patty Smith has called D.C. home. In fact, she’s been selling Street Sense since 2005—two years after the paper was founded. Her life, like many struggling with housing stability, was steeped in unexpected setbacks, bad luck, bad relationships, and bad health. The one constant through the tough times has been music. She’s always singing, taking the pain and the grief of life—the blues—and transforming it into song. Produced for Street Sense Media and the podcast Sounds from the Street.

MARKING TIME WITH SCOTT CAMPBELL [A PORTRAIT]

Photo of Scott Campbell by Dimitri Coste.

The deep-seated human desire to mark a loss, a transition, or to celebrate a random moment in time has driven people to tattoo artists like Scott Campbell for eons. Press play to hear artist Scott Campbell talk about his first tattoo, pirates, the pressure of drawing ink on skin, and how he learned to identify as an artist.

INOCENTE: ART SAVED MY LIFE [An interview]

Inocente's gripping journey from homeless teenager to full-fledged artist was beautifully captured in this film which won the 2013 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short. But the story doesn't end there. After years of drifting from shelter to shelter, Inocente not only has a permanent place to call home, she has serious interest in her artwork, and most impressively, a vocation to advocate for other disenfranchised teens and general access to arts education. Art not only saved her life; art transformed it. [Special thanks to Matt D'Arrigo and Rob Tobin of A Reason to Survive [A.R.T.S] for their generosity and their help. A.R.T.S is the nonprofit that was instrumental in helping Inocente get back on her feet].

Poets Laureate Rita Dove and Tracy K. Smith [a Conversation]

Rita Dove. Photo by Fred Viebahn. Tracy K. Smith. Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

In this edited conversation, we get to eavesdrop on two literary giants as they discuss the transformative power of art, their work as Poets Laureate, and what it means to be educators and female artists in the world today. There’s a bonus short piece (five minutes) featuring Dove and Smith reading and commenting on new poems. Produced for the quarterly magazine of the National Endowment for the Arts.

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED [A half-hour DOCUMENTARY]

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is one of the most honest, searing books about war ever written. This novel is part of the The Big Read, a NEA national initiative designed to unite communities through great literature. As part of The Big Read, the NEA produced audio guides to help communities engage with various texts. This half-hour program features: editor Andrew Carroll; writer Lan Samantha Chang; writer Richard Currey; historian Max Paul Friedman; critic and former NEA literature director David Kipen; writer Alice McDermott; poet E. Ethelbert Miller; actor Bradley Whitford; and the author Tim O'Brien.

URBAN REFUGE [a collage]

In keeping with the 2014 Sapporo Audio Festival's theme of the city in nature, I juxtaposed sounds of urban noise “pollution” (jackhammering, honking, alarms) against sounds of urban “refuge,” including an Om chant inside a yoga studio, wind chimes, and a Muslim prayer). This five-minute sound collage includes audio recorded in Washington, DC, Mumbai, and Istanbul.

BLANDEUR [ANOTHER POEM]

Kay Ryan, U.S. Poet Laureate 2008-2010. Photo by Christina Koci Hernandez, used courtesy of The Library of Congress

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan has, you could say, a spectacular way with words. In fact, she’s even skilled at inventing her own. Take “Blandeur,” from her 2000 collection, Say Uncle. Before the reading below, she offers a punch-in-the-gut explanation of the poem’s title. Ryan read this poem during one of a few interviews she did with the NEA.

Richard Davis recalls Playing Bass on astral weeks [a moment]

In 1968, Richard Davis was tapped to play bass behind Van Morrison. Unbeknownst to everyone in the studio, that recording would go on to become the iconic super classic, Astral Weeks. Here’s Richard Davis.

WE NEED DARKNESS TO SEE THE STARS: VIJAY GUPTA ON STREET SYMPHONY [A perspective]

Vijay Gupta joined the LA Philharmonic Orchestra at 19, the youngest musician to ever join its ranks. Around this time, he met paranoid schizophrenic violinist Nathaniel Ayers, who is played by Jamie Foxx in The Soloist. Based off this friendship and disturbed by LA’s massive homeless population (Skid Row is “home” to nearly 20,000 human beings), Gupta, at age 24, formed Street Symphony—a non-profit dedicated to empowering those on the margins through musical training. He was named a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow in 2017. One year later, at age 31, he received a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. Gupta was selected to give the keynote address of the 2020 Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts & Public Policy. This story ran in the quarterly magazine of the National Endowment for the Arts. The issue is about visionaries.

THE COMPLEXITY OF MUSIC ROYALTIES WITH ROSANNE CASH [A DEBATE]

After Napster and file-sharing blew the doors off the Internet in 1999, the music industry changed. There’s been an ongoing debate ever since about piracy and fair compensation. There’s no uniformity when it comes time to pay-out and oftentimes musicians aren’t getting what they deserve for actually making the music. This begs the most important question of all: What is the actual value of a piece of music? I talked with musician and activist Rosanne Cash and Kevin Erickson, national organizing director at the Future of Music Coalition (a nonprofit musician advocacy group), about some of these issues to try and understand how musicians can be fairly compensated in this brave new technological world.

Understanding The Moth: True Stories Told Live [an analysis]

The Moth’s success underscores the fact that stories connect us more than ever as we navigate an increasingly digital age where it’s more natural to text or tweet than to dial an actual number. Today, we’re going to unpack one of those 15,000 stories with the Moth’s executive director, Sarah Haberman, and producing director, Sarah Austin Jenness. The story under inspection is none other than comedian Tig Notaro’s hysterically devastating piece, “R2, Where Are You?” Tune in to hear her do what she does best: brazenly walk a razor thin line of tragedy and comedy.

DONALD BYRD AND THE ART OF EDUCATION [A PROFILE/DOC]

2000 NEA Jazz Master Donald Byrd. Photo courtesy of Keith Killgo

People casually toss out the phrase “a gentleman and a scholar,” but rarely does the trope fit the recipient like it does with the late, great NEA Jazz Master Donald Byrd. In addition to six graduate degrees and years of teaching, Byrd started jazz studies programs at three colleges, including the prestigious program at Howard University in Washington, DC. It was at Howard where he founded, shaped, and produced the inimitable band the Blackbyrds, a significant component of his legacy. The band blew up in the 1970s with monster hits like “Rock Creek Park” and “Happy Music.” Eventually, their run came to an end until drummer Keith Killgo got the band back together in 1999. In this audio piece, we’ll hear about Byrd’s impact from Killgo. Threaded throughout his commentary, you get to hear interview excerpts of Donald Byrd himself. The sound comes from an archival interview conducted by James Graves for Pacifica Radio.

NATE DIMEO: LISTENING TO THE ROOM

For years, Nate DiMeo has painted stories lifted from American history for his podcast, The Memory Palace. Except instead of a brush, he uses his voice, music, and a microphone. It’s like he takes a Polaroid of an event or a location, say the Vietnam War Draft or the first gay bar in America, and then he takes us inside that photographed image so we can hear and feel what it might have been like to live the experience of that place and time. The stories themselves are works of art, and he’s our digital tour guide. So it makes sense the Metropolitan Museum of Art chose him to be the 2016-17 artist-in-residence—the first podcast producer selected for this honor. In this piece, we’ll hear excerpts from DiMeo’s first commissioned MET story, “Gallery 742,” and his thoughts on the experience and The Memory Palace.

ZAKIR HUSSAIN, MASTER OF THE TABLA

By the age of seven, Zakir Hussain chose to play the tabla like it was a full-time job. His father became his teacher. Young Hussain soaked up all that musical knowledge like a sponge and practiced relentlessly until he, too, became a master. Years later, in 1970, he arrived in the Bay Area and befriended and performed with members of the Grateful Dead, Carlos Santana, and Grace Slick. Raised on a unique blend of traditional Indian music, jazz, and rock, Hussain developed his own style and continues to push music forward today.