Search Results

QUICK NOTES for BLACK FIDDLERS As we gear towards the hectic days of principal photography on the road, I rush to put on paper a few relevant notes, stories that I would like to remember some day in case they don’t make it to the Final Cut. The story of Joseph Bologne, could very well be one of those. He might not have looked Black in some of the whitened portrait, but the fact remains that he was indeed a light-skin Black men, perhaps one of the most notorious mulattoes in Europe’s 18th century. His name was Joseph Bologne often referred to as Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George. He was the son of a planter and his wife’s Senegalese slave.The story of interracial marriages, even those between plantation masters and slave women were more frequent that in the Antilles and in the British colonies that what I had initially presumed, when I started learning about the practice, first next to Bettye Kearse for “The Other Madisons”, and most recently researching Black fiddlers in the during the 18th and first half of the 19th century. “Notorious in the Neighborhood” by Joshua D. Rothman is perhaps one of the most enlightening reads on the subject of “sex and families across Color Line in Virginia 1787-1861”. Regardless, not all mulattoes where as successful as Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George, nor achieve the same level of notoriety. According to Wikipedia, Joseph Bologne was was a French composer, virtuoso violinist, a conductor of the leading symphony orchestra in Paris, and a renowned champion fencer. Born in the then French colony of Guadalupe. Where he was just seven years of age, his father took him to Paris and dropped him off at a boarding school. Years later will join the Légion St.-Georges, the first all-black regiment in Europe, fighting on the side of the Republic. Faithful to his French DNI, he will be remembered by a love interest of his as someone who was "admired for his fencing and riding prowess, he served as a model to young sportsmen (someone) who formed a court around him. A fine dancer, Saint-Georges was welcomed at balls and boudoirs of “highborn" ladies. He loved and was loved." Joseph Bologne composed string quartets (His Violin Concerto in a Major, Op.5 served as underscore in a recent a scene I was editing for "Black Fiddlers"), operas. The first critical edition of his lone surviving opera, L'Amant anonyme (The Anonymous Lover), was prepared by Opera Ritrovata for streaming performance by Los Angeles Opera and the Colburn School in November 2020 (Wikipedia). Today he’s remembered as the first Black-European composer if one is to consider that George Bridgetower was just twenty-two by the time that Bologne died. Bridgetower is another interesting composter which unlike Chevalier de Saint-George we shall visit in "Black Fiddlers” with the help of Nicole Cherry from the University of Texas, and Rita Dove, author of "Sonata Mulatica". However, going back to Bologne, also referred to as the Black Mozart, it will be fair to say that he seemed to be a more complex individual, a man of war and and strong political stands, a fencer, a dancer and, of ofcourse, a composer.

NEW RELEASE OF DOCUMENTARY FILM ABOUT CHORAL COMPOSER ALICE PARKER Hawley, MA April 15, 2021– Melodious Accord, Inc. and Heritage Film Project announce a new release of ALICE: At Home with Alice Parker, a 30-minute documentary directed and filmed by Eduardo Montes-Bradley of Heritage Film Project. GPS Audiovisual in Buenos Aires will release the film on June 3, 2021, making it available to viewers across South America with Spanish subtitling. Alice Parker (b. 1925) is a distinguished composer, conductor, and teacher of choral music. In a career that spans some seventy years, Alice found early prominence as protégé of conductor Robert Shaw, with whom she collaborated as researcher and arranger of folk songs, hymns, and spirituals for the Robert Shaw Chorale. Her hundreds of original compositions include hymns, anthems, song cycles, choral suites and four operas. Renowned within the choral music community, she is widely sought after as a teacher and clinician. As Artistic Director of Melodious Accord since its founding in 1985, she has led performances and workshops, and held hundreds of her signature community SINGS. In ALICE: At Home with Alice Parker, the composer collaborates with Eduardo Montes-Bradley in an intimate portrayal of her life that illuminates her artistic achievements and her passion for life. Alice Parker says, “It was a delight to work on this film with Eduardo. He captures well my life, my home, and the choral music that means so much to me.” Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the film’s premiere took place in an online event hosted by Chorus America on October 8, 2020, with over 500 virtual attendees. The following week it was featured at the Virginia Film Festival; it is currently available for streaming through Films For Change and Kanopy. View the film on Heritage Film Project Official Site. Melodious Accord, Inc. is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization founded by Alice Parker and a close group of friends who shared her passion for singing and song. Emphasizing melody as an unparalleled means of communication for human beings, it promotes the message that singing together brings immediate benefits--physical, mental and spiritual--to those who join in this most participatory of all the arts. Melodious Accord has carried out its mission over its 35-year history by presenting concerts and making recordings, providing opportunities for advanced study, and sponsoring Alice Parker activities. Heritage Film Project, founded in 2008 by husband-and-wife team Eduardo Montes-Bradley (writer and director) and Soledad Liendo (producer), specializes in documenting the lives and works of the creative class—artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, scientists, and scholars. Our subjects typically work against the grain, and in their unconventionality Eduardo and Soledad find a special stimulus to their own creativity. Press Contacts: For Heritage Film Project Name: Eduardo Montes-Bradley Mobile Phone: (434) 422-0883 Email: eduardo@montesbradley.com For Melodious Accord Name: Beth Neville Evans Mobile Phone: (646) 784-7924 Email: bethneville@gmail.com

I’m way behind the curve. Keeping up and grooming a blog takes time and substance. Not that my current life lacks either but managing both while fundraising can be challenging. I can’t say that I never had to beat the drum to pull off getting a documentary across the finish line, but frankly most have resulted from commissioned work, a commission with a budget attached. But what if the project grown beyond the plan to require a greater effort. Well, that happens to be just the case of Black Fiddlers. I was originally supposed to document the lives of Easton, Madison and Beverly, three of Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved children with Sally Hemings, all musicians and fiddlers. However, it did not take long to figure out that they were just three brush strokes in a very complex and intricate canvas of Black fiddlers from Maine to Virginia, from Ohio to Appalachia and across the extensive network of southern plantations. Freemen and the enslave, almost no women to account for, playing European as well as folk music. from colonial times through Emancipation. During that period the fiddle and the banjo became the basic molecular structure of America’s folk music tradition. Much has been said about the latter, but close to nothing about the former. We heard of the close relationship of Solomon Northup and his violin in Twelve Years a Slave, but the fact is that black fiddlers in America at that time were in the thousands and Northup was in no way an isolated event. I knew then I had to tell the big story, the complete story of Black men and their fiddles, and by then the budget had nearly triplicated.to allow longer time for research, new talent, distant locations. I’m not complaining, the story is simply put fabulous and complies with the notion that a story that’s never been told, and that must be told, will be told. So now I also seeing myself in the role of a fundraise. I know I can do this. I made several documentaries in Central America during the Civil War coordinating part of undergrown organization meant ensure that the exposed film would make it to the lab in Los Angeles and then to the editor room in New York, and finally back to El Salvador or Managua for approval and distribution. Only in the last few years live has become somewhat more predictable, but documentary film making has never been as PBS would like you to think. Next week I’ll we start making plans to reach out to friends and friends of friends knowing that they will be happy to hear me say: “I have a great idea for your next tax-deductible contribution. So, give me some money and let’s go out for a drink, I’m buying”.

In about then days from today I will be sitting with John Jeramiah Sullivan in his home in Wilmington, NC. The purpose of the interview is to document for Black Fiddlers, his impressions on early American music. In a recent profile of Rhiannon Giddens publish on the New York Magazine, Mr. Sullivan partially reveals his re-discovery of Francis “Frank” Johnson, the first Black composer to be published in the United States. I landed on the article only to realize that his commitment to. and passion for band-string music, early fiddlers, and other forms of early Black culture in America was remarkable. If all goes well, I might even get a closer look at his collection of photographs recently featured in “Another Article” by MOMA Magazine. In the previously mentioned profile of Rhiannon Giddens, Sullivan mentions ethnomusicologist Kip Lornell who, in the mid 1970s, was associated with “Born for Hard Luck” an extraordinary documentary film portrayal of “Peg Leg Sam”. I contacted Mr. Lornell and he also has agreed to meet and share with us his vast experience on the field, and as a music scholar. We are currently working to schedule that interview as well into the production schedule for Black Fiddlers. With the collaboration of John Sullivan and Kip Lornell, added to those of Rhiannon Giddens, Benjamin Hunter, Jacqueline Djedje and others already committed, Black Fiddlers rises to a new production level that will allow us to reach a much larger audience, while paying an honest and broader tribute to African American fiddlers of the past.

We learn something new every day, and every day we prove ourselves wrong on what was learned as if the learning process would require constant vigilance and testing. To learn and to stand corrected, both revelations do please me greatly. Today I learned, from Dena Ross Jennings about the meaning of the word Sankofa, a term linked to the Ghanaian textile industry, a textile made of handwoven cloth strips of silk and cotton known as Kente. The Kente cloth symbol is often a bird looking look over a precious egg. This symbol is known as Sankofa. Popular believe in Western Africa has it that it is good look back, or to go back and fetch that precious egg you or perhaps someone else left behind. What my friend reminded me is that the spirit of Sankofa is profoundly rooted in the nature of my work as a documentarian. In fact, my entire life has been one in which I search, mostly for someone else’s eggs, but also for mine. Furthermore, I’m now tempted to incorporate that image of the bird looking back to her precious egg as a graphic concept that will rebrand Heritage Film Project. To all, and to Dena Ross Jennings who opened my eyes to this beautiful story, I also say Sankofa!

Meet the two final concepts for the official posters of ALICE: At Home with Alice Parker. One features Winter as a central piece. Winter is an oil on linen by Trina Sears Sternstein, and the other a portrait of Alice Parker in her home-kitchen (Hawley, Massachusetts. December 2019) by Enrique Shore. Both versions of a similar tone will be used to showcase the documentary film by Montes-Bradley about composer Alice Parker. Thumbnails on streaming platforms will slightly differ to accommodate the limitations on screen.

In a few more days I’ll be sixty years old. Not bad, considering I was convinced my expiration date was set for a much earlier date when I was fifteen. Nonetheless, I made it to 1980 and started counting again. In 2000 I visited my birthplace in Cordoba, a place nestled in the foothills of the sierras of South America. I went looking for the midwife who assisted in my deliverance. I was forty then, and she was as old as I’m about to be in a few days when I heard -first hand- about my early adventures. Before parting our ways, she hugged me the way only my mother knew how, as she whispered into my ear the following omen “I hereby grant you another forty years in good health and prosperity”. That was, indeed, a good birthday present. The last twenty years (half the term of the amendment so far) have been a delightful journey with Soledad by my side, with our three children, with my parents in good health, a golden retriever that I miss every day, a cat named Kate; and a steady creative workflow. What more could I ask for? After all, in a few days, I’ll be sixty years old. Back in October, I was approached to produce a film about Alice Parker, the renowned teacher, and composer, at the time, I was only fifty-nine and a half, a child. My first move was to travel to The Berkshires to meet Alice at home, a 17th-century cottage nestled in the foothills, covered in snow, and by the rapid stream, she calls the Singing Brook. What followed was an enlightening experience, six months working together, enjoying each other’s thoughts in a true intellectual game born out of mutual respect and commitment to the film. However, I believe I benefited the most from that relationship for I have learned from Alice Parker a lot more than she will ever know. Alice: At Home with Alice Parker, a thirty + minute documentary film is now completed and ready to stream in public and academic libraries everywhere. And as I watch the film one last time, I can’t help thinking on that fifteen years old me with a cloud hanging over his head, of the midwife in Cordoba renewing our covenant, and of how good life has been to me for the last twenty years. But above all, I think this film, and the privileged of working next to Alice, was just the perfect birthday gift, one I shall never forget.

EARLY MUSIC ACCESS PROJECT & HERITAGE FILM PROJECT present BLACK FIDDLERS of MONTICELLO A Documentary Film by EDUARDO MONTES-BRADLEY CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA, JANUARY 5, 2021: Early Music Access Project and Heritage Film Project are pleased to announce the immediate commencement of production of Black Fiddlers of Monticello, an hour-long documentary directed by Eduardo Montes-Bradley and based on the research of David McCormick and Loren Ludwig. Major funding for this film has been provided by The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. Black Fiddlers of Monticello will be based on the research of violinist and Early Music Access Project Artistic Director David McCormick and music historian and musician Loren Ludwig as 2020 Fellows of the International Center for Jefferson Studies. Their findings indicate that Black fiddlers associated with Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello mastered and ranged comfortably through—as no contemporaneous white musicians did—“high” classical and “low” folk music traditions for white, Black, and integrated audiences. Although neglected in standard histories of early American music, the stories of these Black fiddlers make possible a fresh understanding of how American musicians assimilated European and African traditions to create an American music. Black Fiddlers of Monticello will feature the legacies of two families of fiddlers, related by marriage. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had two fiddle-playing sons: Beverly played for dances at Monticello and Eston became a well-known bandleader in Ohio. Native American fiddler Jesse Scott married into the Hemings family and raised three fiddle-playing sons. The Scott family band was a fixture of downtown Charlottesville, played for Lafayette’s 1824 visit to Monticello, and was hired to play for balls throughout Virginia. Fiddling grandson Robert Scott, Jr. taught at the Jefferson School in Charlottesville, now the site of the African American Heritage Center. EARLY MUSIC ACCESS PROJECT David McCormick davidryanmccormick@gmail.com | +1 (703) 587-0483 684 Lockesley Terrace | Charlottesville, VA 22903 | www.earlymusiccville.org HERITAGE FILM PROJECT Eduardo Montes-Bradley montesbradley@gmail.com | +1 (434) 422-0883 | www.heritagefilmproject.com

Join us on March 18, 2021 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm as The First Amendment Museum hosts the premier screening The Other Madisons. The showing of the 38 minute film with be followed by a conversation with author Bettye Kearse, and filmmaker Eduardo Montes-Bradley. Both the book and the film chronicle Kearse’s family credo which was passed down for 200 years: “Always remember—you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president.” This event will be hosted both via Zoom and Facebook Live, with event details to follow. Please follow the LINK

Uno de los aspectos que distingue a la anécdota del hecho real, es que la anécdota puede forjarse sobre la marcha, enriquecerse con el correr de los años, confabularse. La anécdota tiene la fuerza de un hecho real, pero carece del mismo rigor. La tradición oral, sin ir más lejos, se apoya en gran medida en el anecdotario, y con frecuencia suele suceder que no tenemos más remedio que creer en ellas. Sin ir más lejos, por estos días termino de editar un documental íntegramente basado en la tradición oral de los descendientes negros del presidente James Madison. Esa tradición se origina en el relato de Mandy, la esclava africana a quien el padre del futuro presidente de los Estados Unidos hubo de favorecer en alguna de sus escapadas nocturnas. Para el desarrollo del documental contamos con esa tradición y con las múltiples y rigurosas interpretaciones de arqueólogos e historiadores que buscan descifrar lo anecdótico. En gran medida, los evangelios no son mucho más que anécdotas heredadas, reinterpretadas y consagradas a través del tiempo como verdades absolutas. Es palabra de Dios. Leer el resto del articulo CLICK!