Via Duke Performances:
Duke Performances has commissioned Jenny Scheinman, an acclaimed composer, singer, and violinist, to make an original live score set to 70-year-old archival footage taken by the late North Carolina filmmaker H. Lee Waters. Scheinman and her musical sidemen — Robbie Fulks and Robbie Gjersoe — will create a soundtrack of new folksongs, fiddle music, and field sounds to accompany Waters’ fascinating footage of the Piedmont in the early ’40s, masterfully stitched together by film director Finn Taylor and film editor Rick LeCompte. “Scheinman [has] a distinctive vision of American music, suffused with plainspoken beauty and fortified all at once by country, gospel, and melting-pot folk, along with jazz and the blues” (New York Times).
During the ’30s and ’40s, H. Lee Waters made more than 200 films capturing life in the Piedmont, which he called Movies of Local People. The full slate of Waters’ movies — the only such collection from an itinerant American filmmaker of the era — are now housed at Duke’s Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Scheinman, who recently recorded The Littlest Prisoner for Sony Masterworks with Bill Frisell and Brian Blade, employs her formidable musical ingenuity to make a stirring new presentation drawing from this rich artifact of American cinema.
Event Listing:
BROWN BAG WITH JENNY SCHEINMAN
Tuesday, March 17, 12:30 to 1:30pm
Center for Documentary Studies Library (B113)
1317 W. Pettigrew St., Durham, North Carolina
Free and open to the public.
Beverages and dessert provided courtesy of the Undergraduate Education program at the Center for Documentary Studies.
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IN CONVERSATION: JENNY SCHEINMAN, FINN TAYLOR AND MFA|EDA DIRECTOR TOM RANKIN
Wednesday, March 18, 7:00pm
Full Frame Theater, American Tobacco Campus
320 Blackwell St., Durham
Free & open to the public
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WORLD PREMIERE: JENNY SCHEINMAN + H. LEE WATERS • ‘KANNAPOLIS: A MOVING PORTRAIT’
Friday, March 20, 8:00pm
Reynolds Industries Theater
Jenny Scheinman — composer, arranger, violin, vocals
Robbie Fulks — banjo, vocals
Robbie Gjersoe — guitar, vocals
Finn Taylor — film director
Rick LeCompte — film editor
H. Lee Waters — all original footage
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Made possible, in part, with a grant from The Mary Duke Biddle Foundation; a grant from New Music USA; a Visiting Artist Grant from the Council for the Arts, Office of the Provost, Duke University; support from the Archive of Documentary Arts at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University; and a gift from Neil D. Karbank.
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