The Dreamers are in day two of their five-day recording session at the Music Resource Center(www.musicresourcecenter.org) on Ridge Street. The mixing room is packed with bodies: Three UVA students share a sofa with two sixth graders from Walker Middle School, singer Heather Maxwell stands beside the mixing board with MRC Outreach Coordinator Damani Harrison. All patiently watch two sixth grade girls from Walker as they stand by a microphone in a soundproofed room. One is timid and hangs back from the mic, but the other is outspoken.
“I’m off-key,” she insists. “Ms. Heather, I’m off-key.”
 Damani Harrison and Heather Maxwell at the mixing board in the Music Resource Center. Harrison arranged music for The Dreamers in advance, and, with Maxwell, guided The Dreamers through the recording process, finishing five songs in as many days. |
Maxwell excuses herself from the mixing room and joins the two Dreamers in the studio to help them hold a note.
“The Dreamers” is a nickname for students in the “I Have a Dream” Foundation (www.ihad.org), which dates to 1981 when New York City businessman Eugene Lang promised an elementary school class that he would pay the college tuition of any students that graduated from high school. The Charlottesville group began in 2000 with a group of Clark Elementary students, now sixth graders at Walker.
After a tour of the MRC in spring of 2006, many of The Dreamers began spending time at the facility; by summer, the place was so popular among the students that Erica Lloyd, the project coordinator for the Charlottesville branch, asked Sibley Johns, executive director of the MRC, to help the kids record musical responses to a question: “How do you want to change the world?”
Under the guidance of Maxwell, The Dreamers are living up to their radio-ready moniker. They sound like a pop band.
During the same spring that The Dreamers discovered the MRC, Maxwell was with two UVA students in Mali, southwest of Algeria in Africa, to perform at the annual Festival sur le Niger. Maxwell has a doctorate in ethnomusicology, and was the only non-Malian invited to perform at the fest. “I built a reputation there,” she explains to me in one of the empty recording rooms.
The life expectancy in Mali is 49 years, and there is a high risk of infectious diseases. Maxwell, who has released multiple albums in African dialects, structures her songs in styles familiar to the native Malians. “Our topics were things like oral dehydration, infant diarrhea.” says Maxwell. The familiar rhythms and language make the songs self-sustaining, which helps them to perpetuate messages about hygiene. “Healing is specific to music in these countries,” Maxwell says.
Upon Maxwell’s return, the singer pitched a January-term course to UVA. Titled “Music, Health and Environment,” the course explores Malaysian, Haitian and Malian healing music. Around the same time, Johns caught wind of Maxwell’s plans and put Lloyd and The Dreamers in touch with Maxwell.
“These kids are just beginning to grapple with community and the human condition,” says Johns. “I thought that matched Heather’s ideals perfectly.”
With Maxwell’s help, The Dreamers’ project changed course, and the students began to record simple jingles about issues important to them as young Charlottesville residents.
With February being Black History Month, The Dreamers, 53-percent African Americans, plan to shop their radio spots to local stations once they are mixed, just in time for the month-long honor. None of the five songs address racial issues specifically, however.
Just as pop songs can stay on the Billboard charts for years, the “I Have a Dream Foundation” is not calendar-bound in its efforts—The Dreamers have six more years of school before they receive their college tuition. Like Maxwell’s music and their own tunes, the goals of The Dreamers stretch beyond February 28. Now they simply have to hold a note.