“Strings Night”
All strings students at Scrollworks
Scrollworks String Orchestra
Chamber Strings
Metropolitan Youth Orchestra of Central Alabama
Scrollworks’ mission, as a non-profit organization, is to offer quality music education for children in the local community regardless of their ability to pay, with a focus on minorities and the under-served areas of Greater Birmingham. We fulfill this mission by providing a truly unique learning environment wherein the student guides the teacher to their greatest area of interest and in turn the teacher adapts to each individual child’s learning style.
Modeling itself after Venezuela’s El Sistema, Scrollworks is an atypical community music school. Our aim is to provide intensive music instruction to disadvantaged children in their neighborhood, children who otherwise would not have access to quality instruction. Our purpose is to awaken, nurture and develop a passion for music in everyone, creating opportunities to explore and cultivate their talents in order that they become active contributors to Birmingham’s rich and diverse culture.
Staffed by accomplished musicians with real-world experience, our comprehensive and progressive music education program encompasses all genres of music from classical to present day musical styles, including jazz, rock, hip-hop, country, world music and more.
Instruction will be offered for any instrument, as well as voice, music theory, history, composition, songwriting, technology, recording and production. Lessons will be provided in both group and one-on-one settings, with ensembles ranging from small to large, traditional to experimental, demonstrating our belief that the person who plays in an ensemble begins to live the experience of community.
Our goal is to see that certain look in each student’s eye that can’t be described or measured: a spark of insight, a twinkle of engagement, pure joy.
Paul is a young man who began wailing straight out of the womb, and most folks would agree that he hasn’t stopped since. “Oh what a set of lungs that child has,” they’d say, “he must be destined for something special.” Not wishing to disappoint, and being a good young southern boy, Paul began singing in church, stretching those vocal cords with an eye toward becoming a man of the cloth. As it turns out, however, the cloth didn’t appreciate young Paul’s affinity for dirty jokes, Prince, and Tom Waits, and he was inclined to search elsewhere for co-conspirators. He began plying his trade with whomever would have him, and happily, folks were mostly impressed by his efforts. With a wholly re-imagined take on the sounds he’d grown up singing and seeking, Paul recruited a rag-tag band of loveable weirdoes, visionaries, and hacks to help him harness the power he now knew he possessed. Under the nom du guerre St. Paul and the Broken Bones, the motley crew roams the countryside looking to get cabooses shakin’, faces meltin’, and brothers and sisters everywhere testifyin’.
TIDWELL comes from a country music background: her mother, Connie Eaton, had a brief brush with fame in the 1970s, and her father, like TIDWELL’s husband (and co-producer) Todd, works in one of Nashville’s prestigious Music Row establishments. Growing up in the heart of Music City she spent her childhood years in her bedroom, avoiding the painful breakup of her parents’ marriage by listening to a wide variety of music, headphones clamped to her ears. Swearing she would never follow the footsteps of her mother, whose brief taste of success also unleashed a series of psychological problems, she eventually succumbed to music’s lure, beginning by booking bands for a local pizza restaurant. She briefly formed a punk rock act with another girlfriend and she eventually fell to making music alone, combining the various country influences around which she’d grown up with the music she’d discovered for herself.
An American Music Band from Black Mountain,NC. No hot girl. Respected for their originality, production, songwriting, sympathetic musicianship. Becoming known for being underrated and creatively pure, they have struggled to find mainstream success. Notable fans include My Morning Jacket, Band of Horses, Dr.Dog, The Black Keys, Jonah Hill.
They have released three LPs on Park the Van Records; Research(2008), Self-Titled(2009), Desert Etiquette(2011).
It’s been nearly two decades since Lambchop released its first album, at the time pronouncing itself “Nashville’s most fucked-up country band.” Provocative it may have been, but the description made sense: at the heart of all that ruckus was a band at once defying and embracing the musical legacy of its hometown. Since then, Lambchop has evolved into an accomplished ensemble, adding palpable depth and substance to singer-songwriter-guitarist Kurt Wagner’s songs—and the band sounds as commanding as ever on its 11th album, Mr. M, a collection of meditations on love and loss and the detritus of everyday existence.
Recorded at Mark Nevers’s Nashville Beech House studio cum bungalow and dedicated to Vic Chesnutt, Mr. M includes the usual core of musicians- Scott Martin (drums), Matt Swanson (bass), Ryan Norris (guitar, organ), Tony Crow (piano), William Tyler (guitar) and guests include original co-founder Jonathan Marx, delightful Cortney Tidwell (who shared vocals on 2010’s KORT project) and fiddler Billy Contreras (who has worked with all from Charlie Louvin to Laura Cantrell) – and with spectacular string arrangements shared between Peter Stopschinski and Mason Neely, it stretches out sonically as promised. (Incidentally the paintings, thickly layered black and white portraits forming a series called Beautillion Millitaire 2000, feature on the album sleeve and throughout the full artwork).
The core of the music remains the cyclical picking of Wagner’s guitar and the soft, warm croaking of his voice. The songs are spacious, even dreamy, as on the Countrypolitan instrumental “Gar,” while the lyrics and titles are rich with allusions, some of them obvious, others seemingly unknowable.
Percussion Ensemble
Jazz Ensemble
Rhythm Circle
Children’s Choir
Scrollworks’ mission, as a non-profit organization, is to offer quality music education for children in the local community regardless of their ability to pay, with a focus on minorities and the under-served areas of Greater Birmingham. We fulfill this mission by providing a truly unique learning environment wherein the student guides the teacher to their greatest area of interest and in turn the teacher adapts to each individual child’s learning style.
Modeling itself after Venezuela’s El Sistema, Scrollworks is an atypical community music school. Our aim is to provide intensive music instruction to disadvantaged children in their neighborhood, children who otherwise would not have access to quality instruction. Our purpose is to awaken, nurture and develop a passion for music in everyone, creating opportunities to explore and cultivate their talents in order that they become active contributors to Birmingham’s rich and diverse culture.
Staffed by accomplished musicians with real-world experience, our comprehensive and progressive music education program encompasses all genres of music from classical to present day musical styles, including jazz, rock, hip-hop, country, world music and more.
Instruction will be offered for any instrument, as well as voice, music theory, history, composition, songwriting, technology, recording and production. Lessons will be provided in both group and one-on-one settings, with ensembles ranging from small to large, traditional to experimental, demonstrating our belief that the person who plays in an ensemble begins to live the experience of community.
Our goal is to see that certain look in each student’s eye that can’t be described or measured: a spark of insight, a twinkle of engagement, pure joy.
Jackson, MS based, Wooden Finger began as a collaboration between Matthew Magee and Allison Jenkins. Their diverse musical backgrounds resulted in 2006 debut LP All This Time…Still We’re Lost, which was a haunting blend of atmospheric folk rock and cinematic baroque pop. They are now releasing their much anticipated sophomore recording, Take and See and Do What You Want, which has a distinctly more rhythmic direction. Magee and Jenkins are now joined by Ryan Baucum (bass), Chip Burr (drums) and Jason Daniel (guitar) which has resulted in a much more driving, uplifting, and energetic pop feel. They plan to tour extensively in support of this new recording.
Memphis soul/jazz organ trio The City Champs return to Memphis’ Electraphonic Recording studio for the follow up to their acclaimed debut album, The Safecracker. The Set-Up finds the group stretching out, adding Latin jazz, psychedelia and 60’s film score influences to their established Booker T. and the MGs meets Blue Note/Prestige Records sound.
The City Champs are comprised of three of Memphis’ top musicians: Guitarist Joe Restivo, organist Al Gamble and drummer George Sluppick. Their resumes include studio recordings and live dates with artists such as Rufus Thomas, Alex Chilton, JJ Grey and MOFRO, William Bell, Syl Johnson and the Memphis Horns.
Augmenting the City Champs trio sound on The Set-Up is renowned Motown Funk Brother Jack Ashford on tambourine (who was featured in the award winning documentary, Standing in the Shadows of Motown), The Bo-Keys horn men (Marc Franklin, Jim Spake and Kirk Smothers), Latin percussionist Felix Hernandez and Bo-Keys bassist and The Set-Up’s producer, Scott Bomar, who most recently produced Cyndi Laupers’ “Memphis Blues.”
Since the release of their first album, the group has toured the US with The North Mississippi Allstars and performed shows with bassist Robert Mecurio from Galactic. The group has also had their music prominently featured in the Emmy Award winning documentary, I Am a Man: From Memphis a Lesson in Life and the MTV series, $5 Cover
Though born in Memphis, Tennessee, Reverend John Wilkins is a child of the North Mississippi Hill Country. His mother was born in Holly Springs and his father was from Hernando. While Wilkins grew up in the city, family parties and neighborhood picnics featuring country blues and fife and drum bands were never farther than a short drive over the Mississippi state line.
John Wilkins’ father, the venerated blues and gospel singer Robert Wilkins, was the principal influence on his young son’s development as a musician. Wilkins’ father had made a series of recordings in the 1930s that included the original “Prodigal Son” (initially recorded as a secular song called “That’s No Way To Get Along”), which was later recorded by the Rolling Stones. The elder Wilkins developed a gospel style that was based on his earlier country blues style – a style that developed into the rock ‘n’ roll sound that Memphis, and then the world, would later claim as it’s own.
When the young John Wilkins was learning to play guitar, he picked up his father’s gospel and country blues styles. He also absorbed the citified soulful sounds that were being pioneered by local musicians and recorded by legendary Memphis labels like Sun, Stax and Hi.
As he approached adulthood in the 1960s, John Wilkins could be found playing in church, at parties, and at clubs. Like his father before him, Wilkins walked a similar musical line between the sacred and secular. He played guitar on O.V. Wright’s famous 1965 single “You’re Gonna Make Me Cry” and later in the early 1970s recorded as a member of the M & N Gospel Singers for Style Wooten’s Designer Records.
In the early 1980′s, Wilkins life came full circle when he followed his father’s call to ministry. He became pastor of Hunter’s Chapel Church and ever since, Wilkins has led a congregation that includes generations of Tate county locals, as well as the late fife players Othar Turner and Napolian Strickland and their families, and numerous other regional parishioners and North Mississippi musicians.
In earlier times, legendary Hill Country bluesman Fred McDowell and his wife Annie Mae were members of Hunter’s Chapel congregation. It was they who, in the mid 1960s first introduced the Hunter’s Chapel Singers to the world on the outstanding album called Amazing Grace for Testament Records.
“You Can’t Hurry God” is Reverend John Wilkins’ debut full-length album. In it he showcases an individual sound that is regional and universal. This recording is a culmination of a lifetime spent learning from, and ministering to some of the luminaries of North Mississippi and Memphis. And, this sound can have only been made by a child of the North Mississippi Hill Country.
