Hampton roads has been the launching point for many performing artists who have gone on to become major-leaguers.
Portsmouth has Missy Elliott, Norfolk has Timbaland, Virginia Beach has The Neptunes' Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, Williamsburg has Bruce Hornsby.
These people are household names around the nation, at least, and are performing around the world, but new artists are still here, hustling for their big shots. Here's a look at three artists or groups poised to become part of Hampton Roads' next wave.
MARTHA GILES
For angelic, "I'm-on-the-way-to-heaven" sounding instruments, conventional wisdom says you've got your harp, and your piano, and that's about it. Violin, maybe. But there's another transcendent instrument that has been overlooked for enrollment in the pretty instruments pageant: the hammered dulcimer. Seventy-four strings of bliss. At least when Martha Giles plays it.
The hammered dulcimer - a trapezoid-shaped log that looks like a chunk from a piano's guts - is an instrument upon which people typically play Celtic tunes. Folk songs from America, Ireland or Scotland. Not Martha Giles.
She plays Bach.
And since the hammered dulcimer is played like a xylophone, with two delicate little mallets tapping strings more interweaved than America's highways, you can't really read music while you're doing it, so Giles memorizes the Bach suites and plays them on the dulcimer. You read that right: she memorizes the Bach suites. Giles' music is the perfect soundtrack for a wedding, a massage or a yoga session, because once those strings start resonating they take over the whole room with a mesmerizing, aggressive loveliness. It could clear your sinuses.
Giles came to Virginia Beach in 1987. She has long been a piano instructor to children and adults. She plays the piano and French horn. She illustrates children's books as well.
"I feel like my whole body is engaged," Giles said recently as she played the hammered dulcimer to a small audience at the Great Neck Area Library in Virginia Beach. "I can't let my mind wander. In a way it is much more challenging than the other instruments."
Giles intends to one day merge her illustrations with dulcimer playing to make a lullaby book with companion CD. For now, though, she has flung herself full-throttle into dulcimer playing. Her CD "Inventio: Transcriptions for Two Hammered Dulcimers," featuring her friend Robert Wadsorth, finds Giles playing what she aptly describes as "a dance of mallets on a sea of strings; bright and resonant, shimmering and somewhat mysterious." Indeed.
Martha Giles plays Sunday at the Fred Heutte Center in Norfolk. Visit her at www.marthagiles.com.
CED HUGHES
A Ced Hughes performance, like the ones frequently at The Boot in Norfolk, is something to behold, including for the spectacle that the people gathered create.
For one, their fashion choices - snug fitting clothes, ironic T-shirts, trendy, loud sneakers, etc. - are nothing short of theater. And then the sight of these rebelliously-clad youths of various backgrounds sweating and dancing without any trace of self-consciousness is sheer joy.
At the heart of this is something even more unusual; Ced Hughes is not DJing or playing guitar but rapping - over electro and familiar indie-rock, no less.
"I see a lot of the scenester hipster kids come out, and I don't think hipster is a negative word," says Hughes, whose own sartorial choices can run to the whimsical. (He often wears those cheap plastic Wayfarers with the neon arms you find at drugstores.) "Everybody is trying to be so different that they end up looking the same. If I want to wear a white tee and tight jeans, I will. I don't care."
Today, a rapper photographed in tight jeans at night can almost count on being ridiculed in celebrity blogs by morning. Yet Hughes' embracing of the offbeat is part of his appeal.
Rap has long force-fed its machismo, so Hughes seems a contrast to ordinary rap. Or does he? Maybe he fits in entirely. Clearly, the hip-hop pendulum is swinging away from thug histrionics back to its origins: something whole and reflective and human, like the fashion/emo hip-hop of Lupe Fiasco, Pharrell Williams and Kanye West.
In fact, Hughes, who will undoubtedly be compared to West, has been scouted by A&R reps from Kanye West's Good Music label. He wowed them and other trendsetters at the music festival South by Southwest in March.
More dates are coming, yet when Hughes is not serving as Norfolk's ambassador of hipsterdom, he is a regular dude who not long ago returned to live with his parents in Moyock, N.C., after trying college.
"I wasn't studying anything, actually," he says of his time at Delaware State University, which he says he chose because he liked its colors. "But if you want to say I was studying anything, say communications." Books and sports bored him - he had a track and basketball scholarship - so he switched to East Carolina University. Bored still, he dropped out. He focused on music.
Hughes takes his inspirations from almost anywhere: cartoons, radio, the music he heard over the speakers at his previous job, the decidedly non-gangsta young women's clothing store Forever 21.
"Forever 21 was a blessing in disguise," he says. "There's a dope selection of electro, indie rock and hip-hop. I would hear the songs, then go home, chop it up and remix it and rap over it."
Hughes is often in Norfolk, where he and his friends - a collection of visual and musical artists who call themselves Rebel E - are actively working to build a scene. Hughes thinks that even in Hampton Roads, where there's no shortage of hood worship, they can make a movement.
"I think people are ready for it, they just have to have somebody tell them it's cool," he says. "They just don't know how to react to it because the masses haven't got onto it. But a lot of people want to come to parties and dance and get down and not worry about being cool and getting sweaty and 'preserving their sexy.'"
He's recently signed a production deal with a company he doesn't want to name yet, but it was enough to encourage him to quit his job. What's next? "Nothing much. Just world domination." He'll be in and out of town, but he'll always have Tidewater.
"I travel a lot, but I definitely love it here. There are a lot of dope people here in music and fashion. They're just undercover. You have to find them."
Ced Hughes performs at The Boot on Saturday. Visit him at www.myspace.com/cedhughes.
THE DUNES
Clues you're at the meeting place of a band serious about its music:
- Full ash trays.
- At least two-thirds of the group is drinking beer.
- Brown plaid couch appears to be from the early 80s, possibly late 70s.
- At least half of group is barefoot or bare-chested.
- Unopened breakfast sandwich from McDonald's on coffee table at 6 p.m.
Coffee table is a drum with a glass top.
Clearly, the guys who make up The Dunes have much more to do than cook, clean or bother with shoes. They are busy etching out a path for themselves as a premier garage band in Hampton Roads.
"We just love doing it, so we keep going," says Jeff Schuyler, the band's bassist who says that the band's one-time notion of netting a record deal has changed in favor of something more self-controlled and local in light of the music business' continually gloomy outlook. "We just have as much of our focus as we can on playing around here."
Their music blends garage, indie, punk, ska and even a touch of hip-hop's verbal pacing for a fresh, unconventional sound.
Preparation for The Dunes' gigs at spots including The NorVa, The Boot and Starz begins at the aforementioned home of drummer Joey Proffitt, where the congregated band makes for an interesting, motley sight.
There's Schuyler, an education consultant with specks of gray on his temples; vocalist and guitarist Daniel Pravda, an English professor at Norfolk State University; drummer Proffitt, who runs a carpet-cleaning business; guitarist, writer and artist Mark Williams, who bears a faint resemblance to Al Roker; Chris Leonard, the trumpeter who works at the Naval Shipyard; and the group's mascot, a hairless Chinese Crested that may frighten small children. Mutual friends got the guys from various cities and backgrounds to meet along the way; they've become united by a love of Hampton Roads' water, dunes and music.
"I'm really impressed by a lot of the musical talent here," says Schuyler. Pravda agrees: "The punk-metal scene here is reproducing. We go to shows and see the same group of people. It's possible this area could be the next Seattle."
The Dunes are doing their part. They're performing and looking for a place to record an EP, titled "Seven Generations," and mapping out a work in the vein of Pink Floyd's "The Wall." But there's always time for a beer - especially the stuff Schuyler brews in his kitchen sink.
The Dunes perform at Starz Restaurant & Lounge in Virginia Beach on Sunday. Visit them at www.myspace.com/thedunesus.
Malcolm Venable, (757) 446-2662, malcolm.venable@pilotonline.com