Mark Kemp (CL editor) 
Member since Dec 28, 2016

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Mark Kemp is Creative Loafing's editor-in-chief. The author of Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race and New Beginnings in a New South, he has… More »

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Re: “Bach in a Hard Place

Thank you for setting us straight and urging us to clarify this, Mr. Taylor. Of course it was not blatant disrespect of Ms. Romey. We have expanded on her credentials in the above story, and writer Perry Tannenbaum replies below:

"No disrespect was intended, either by me, or by Scott Allen Jarrett, who was my source. To be fair to Jarrett, however, I should say that he said more in Kathy Romey's favor than I relayed. Here's how the paragraph reads in my transcript: 'So Ive been engaged to teach two cantatas [at Oregon Bach Festival] just like Helmut did, cantatas 77 and 105. Also, we have engaged a man named Adam Romey as our managing director, and you might recognize that name, because his mother is Kathy Romey, who has been Helmut's longtime assistant and the chorus master at the Oregon Festival. It was her dad who founded the Oregon Festival with Helmut.'

"What I wrote was from the standpoint of underscoring the rock-star staff Charlotte Bach has assembled and Adam Romey's family connections with Helmuth Rilling, founder and leader of multiple prestigious Bach festivals here and abroad. So I would only dispute the objection that Romey was not Rilling's assistant, because I view Jarrett as a reliable source. Another pertinent quote from Jarrett, 'I was the assistant conductor and director of choruses for Charlotte Symphony from 2004 to 2015,' further clarifies his viewpoint. When you are the choirmaster, and a symphony or festival presents an oratorio or a cantata, the symphony conductor conducts both ensembles onstage, and the choirmaster — who likely prepared the choir in rehearsals —comes forward after the performance to share in taking the bows. He or she has been the conductor's assistant in my view and, apparently, in Jarrett's. I did verify that Kathy Romey is currently the choirmaster at Oregon Bach Festival and that, indeed, Adam Romey's grandfather, Royce Saltzman, co-founded the Festival with Rilling."

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Posted by Mark Kemp (CL editor) on 06/12/2018 at 10:49 AM

Re: “Local Singer Revisits the 'Wasteground' of His Northern Ireland Youth

Thanks, Jamie and Todd. Telling his story was an honor and a privilege. Mickey's a great guy. And the album is fantastic.

1 like, 0 dislikes
Posted by Mark Kemp (CL editor) on 05/17/2018 at 6:00 PM

Re: “Charlotte's Ace Comic Takes on a Touchy-Feely Challenge in 'Every Brilliant Thing'

Our apologies, theaterlover. That info should be at the bottom of the story now. Thanks for letting us know.

Posted by Mark Kemp (CL editor) on 05/09/2018 at 12:51 PM

Re: “Do I Have to Drink to Have a Good Time?

❤️

Posted by Mark Kemp (CL editor) on 10/05/2017 at 9:44 PM

Re: “Oddboy Collective Brings Another Month of DIY Variety

You are right, Greenman: The wording in that paragraph was misleading. Our print issue street date is Thursday, so I was writing this piece to push to next week's Oddboy event and the subsequent weeks' events. But I should not make reference to "last week" in a paper whose issues straddle two different weeks. I regret the error and have clarified the wording now. Apologies to you and any others who read it and were confused. Thank you for pointing it out.

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Posted by Mark Kemp (CL editor) on 09/06/2017 at 11:16 PM

Re: “It's Time for Charlotte to Wipe Away Confederate Stains

I hear you, Brian. But most of the more offensive monuments paying tribute to and honoring civil war "heroes" were erected decades after -- and, in the case of one Charlotte monument, more than a century after -- the end of the civil war. These were erected by those who wanted to skew the reality that this war was about slavery and exploitation of blacks in this country. They were erected as slaps in the face of citizens of the United States whose ancestors were ripped from their native Africa. Period.

Also, I think you may be confusing hatred with anger when you refer to "hatred that exist on all sides." The hatred comes from the historic racist oppressors; anger is a result of that hatred. I believe equating white supremacist hatred with black anger (and that of non-black allies) is simplistic, at best.

My clarion call in this column is not about erasing history. There are many ways to remember this great country's shameful past (and my juxtaposition of "great" with "shameful" here is not a contradiction; nations and individuals alike can harbor both "greatness" and "shame"). Bestowing honor on those who have consistently and purposefully made life miserable for black citizens of the United States is not the way to remember that past. It is deliberately hurtful.

Garrett Epps wrote a terrific piece on this in the Atlantic in June, an excerpt of which is in italics below:

Would reducing the bronzed omnipresence of the Confederate General Staff really eliminate 'history'?

Lets look at real history. Americans tend to assume that Southern segregation was a 'natural' legacy of antebellum slavery. The truth is far more complicated. After the Civil War, the South went through a period of transition -- not simply during 'Reconstruction' (which ended in about 1877) but for the two decades that followed. There was no overall system of separation; gross racism and discrimination existed alongside tentative inter-racial cooperation and political coalition-building. Until the first decade of the twentieth century, black Southerners continued to vote, to serve on juries, and to hold state and local office. The last first-generation black member of the U.S. House left office in 1901.

Only with the rise of the U.S. as an imperial power -- forcibly dominating people of color from San Juan to Manila -- did the idea of legal white supremacy become acceptable to a majority of whites in North or South. Thus began the era of segregation -- a system that subordinated black Southerners economically, disfranchised them politically, and isolated them in public and private space. Whats called the 'nadir' of race relations was the early 20th Century, not the 1870s and 80s.

The year 1890 saw the first segregation-era Southern state constitution, in South Carolina, strip blacks of the right to vote. That same year, the giant Lee statue went up in Richmond. Virginia itself disfranchised black voters in 1902. The monuments to Jefferson Davis and Jeb Stuart went up in 1907; the horseback statue of Jackson was unveiled in 1919. All across the South during these years, these statues went up to mark the triumph of the once-outlandish idea of segregation.

Segregation had an official myth: "The white South would have freed its slaves voluntarily if not for Northern meddling. The North destroyed the South because it coveted its natural resources and its cheap labor. After the War, corrupt 'carpetbaggers' and vile Southern white 'scalawags' seized power with Northern bayonets, upheld by ignorant, illiterate blacks. Heroic white conservatives finally did away with the 'corrupt Negro vote,' restored to power the Souths natural leaders, and returned black Southerners to their proper subordinate place."

Blacks played no part in any of Southern history. They had no past, and no future, in white America.

As New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in his recent speech, 'These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.'


To Brian (and anyone else who's gotten this far): If you're interested in these issues, I highly recommend reading Epps' entire piece at the Atlantic, as his argument is eloquent and well-thought-out.

Yours sincerely,

Mark Kemp
Editor
Creative Loafing

3 likes, 0 dislikes
Posted by Mark Kemp on 08/17/2017 at 12:57 PM

Re: “Elenora Fagan balances life between rock and rap

Hi MusicMike,
Thanks for writing and asking. We reached out to Elenora Fagan bassist Juan Ossa, who informed us, "Elenora was dissolved a while ago. We got to record an album and everyone kind of started drifting apart. Two of the guys had kids and stuff, so that had something to do with it. My career as photographer/filmmaker started picking up as well, so I had to choose. Our guitar player still plays as a solo artist and sometimes as a session player. He goes by the name Von Hunter."

You can find Elenora Fagan's self-titled album of 2011 on iTunes at this link:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/elenora-…

And follow Von Hunter (who's now doing acoustic funk, rock, reggae and soul) at his Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/VonHunterMusic/

1 like, 0 dislikes
Posted by Mark Kemp (CL editor) on 07/28/2017 at 5:41 PM

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