- Coming up on "Curate."

- Becoming blind was very much a catalyst for me to discover how much more important music is in my life.

- [Jessica] There's something really great about telling something painful and personal with this group of strangers.

- [Dominic] When I told them that I was writing a book, they looked at me like I had three heads.

(upbeat music) - Good to see you.

I'm Heather Mazzoni.

- And I'm Jason Kypros.

Welcome back to "Curate."

- Virginia Beach jazz pianist and composer Justin Kauflin lost his sight at age 11 due to a rare eye condition, but he never let that slow down his ascent to greatness.

He has played with some of the biggest names in music, including Quincy Jones, Clark Terry, and WHRO's own Jae Sinnett.

- Justin continues to perform all over the world but has also returned to the Governor's School of the Arts, where he teaches jazz to some of the best and brightest young musicians in Hampton Roads.

(elegant jazz music) (elegant jazz music continues) - [Audience Member] Whew.

Whoo!

- Ugh.

Who you are as a human is what will come out in your music.

(pensive music) My name's Justin Kauflin.

I'm a pianist and a composer.

I like music a lot.

Music was a thing that I gravitated to from an early age, piano and violin.

(pensive music) (flowing upbeat music) (flowing upbeat music continues) Piano became this place that I just found myself without thinking about it.

You know, after I was done with school, I would spend hours practicing.

(pensive music) (pensive music continues) I think becoming blind was very much a catalyst for me to discover how much more important music, you know, is in my life.

I auditioned to get into a magnet program in high school, the Governor's School for the Performing Arts.

They wisely saw that maybe being in the classical program would be a bit challenging with the sight-reading requirements.

So they dropped me into the jazz program.

I didn't really know anything about it, but very quickly fell in love with how I didn't feel limited because of my lack of sight.

I was able to learn everything by ear, and that's kind of a part of the jazz tradition.

- [Leader] Ooh, ah, ah, and, two, ah.

(upbeat jazz music) - The whole experience playing with Jae and Terry has been incredible.

I've learned so much about playing with passion, playing with that kind of energy from Jae and Terry.

The kind of intensity that they play with has really, I think, elevated my whole approach to playing this music.

You know, I used to be petrified playing with Jae when he first had me come on, but every time we would start playing the music, it would really settle in.

They would make me feel comfortable and help me to reach new levels in my own playing.

And just the kind of support I get from them has been unbelievable.

(upbeat jazz music continues) - [Audience Member] Whoa.

- I'm now teaching at my alma mater, and people say that, you know, "You really should get into teaching," and I was very hesitant.

I didn't feel prepared.

I didn't feel like I was in the right place.

And for whatever reason, getting to spend time with the students at the Governor's School has allowed me to realize that I do have things that I can share, just to be able to go back to the place that really started so much for me and then to contribute and help the kids work through things that I dealt with at that age.

I've been very blessed to have a connection with Clark Terry Mulgrew Miller, with Quincy Jones.

That's something that I realized is a responsibility for me to share what I've learned from these remarkable individuals.

It's a part of this continuum.

(upbeat jazz music continues) For me the thing is, that draws me to it, is more of the sharing nature of it and hopefully finding resonance with other people.

I think that's the main goal.

It's exciting to think about this whole topic in terms of community.

It seems like we need that more.

We don't have to understand each other in so many ways, right?

You can be on the other side of any spectrum, political or anything, but like, when you can find these things that pull people in like that where it becomes contagious, it's like, wow, something special happened.

(upbeat jazz music continues) (audience applauds) - Make sure to follow us online and on your favorite social media platform.

A group of storytellers gather in Hampton to spin yarns for a festival that celebrates both the stories and the tellers.

(upbeat music) - One thing storytelling does do is bring together community, and that's what we wanna see happen.

The other thing that we're doing in this area is we're putting them in all the different neighborhood and community centers.

They can laugh together.

They can cry together.

They can be inspired together.

And I believe that's what storytelling does around the world.

- But I was not the sort of pastor who preached people into hell at a funeral.

I don't know if you've been to a funeral where the preacher's like, "It's too late for him, but if you don't straighten your ways, you're going to hell right now."

I never did.

I always told my congregation, if you want me to tell you to go to hell, you come see me later.

And so... (audience laughs) - I tell the story about my aunt having the FBI come to vet her in 1940 something, and all the neighbors thought she was in trouble.

And so they all said they didn't know her, you know.

So those are the kind of stories that I tell.

Hi, there's some FBI agents in my living room, and they said they wanna know if we know a Evelyn Deloris Johnson, also known as Dolly.

And I said, "No, I don't know," but I do know, but I said, "I didn't know her."

And but you don't know me.

And she said, "I never heard of her."

(audience laughs) She said, "Well, good, you keep saying that.

Don't change that.

Just keep saying it."

We want storytelling to become part of Hampton's culture.

And the reason for that is in our world today, more people are talking at each other and not with each other, not to each other.

And if people begin to share their stories, then they'll recognize they have more commonalities than they think.

- So my father was a church organist and choir master.

Organ players never, ever, ever wear street shoes.

My father had this very special pair of patent leather shoes.

So he was kind of dangling his feet under there, and the laces were kind of dangling there off the shoes.

So, (audience member chuckles) very carefully, not to be noticed, I slid around behind my father.

He didn't stop playing.

So I got both shoes untied, and I tied 'em together.

(cackles) I knew that what should have happened was, dah-dah, but it was one single boom, which means it worked.

You start knowing the bones of the story you wanna tell, and you may work out specific phrases that you wanna keep, but ultimately a storyteller is free to shift the story as you watch the audience because the audience shifts.

So what do you say you close up the the keyboard, and we go home?

Yeah, and I'm gonna tell Mama it was a perfect day.

And then he said, "And about that trick you played on me with the shoe laces, it was pretty darn funny."

(audience laughs) (audience applauds) - I got invited to an an open mic storytelling event.

I had just recently gotten divorced, and the theme of the night was, "Love Sucks."

And I told a story about my ex-husband, and the audience thought it was funny, so they laughed at my pain.

There's something really great about telling something painful and personal and sharing that with this group of strangers.

So I fell in love with it.

(audience applauds) - Papa, Papa, gave him this here box.

His name was Kimone.

He was a African.

And so that African say that anything, any problems that we have, can be solved by what's in this box.

Some powerful stuff in this box, he said.

But if we opens it for a time, then there's a big curse that'll come.

I don't know if we should open that box.

- Every other art comes from storytelling.

Our dance is a great story.

Our music is to sing story.

- And then they heard Big Mama singing that song.

♪ I know why the bird's always singing ♪ ♪ I know why the moon shines at night ♪ - Uh-huh.

♪ Yesterday's gone ♪ ♪ Today has come ♪ - Shall we right that?

(audience laughs) - What I see people walk away from when they leave a storytelling festival, is they walk away thinking how nice this was.

And one other thing, sometimes they walk away going, "I think I have a story to tell."

- I am the oldest and the very newest storyteller, so you don't need to hear from me today.

You just need to know that I can talk.

- [Audience Member] All right, all right.

- Last fall was kind of different for me I guess in the way I was kind of looking for something to do that was meaningful, that would have some impact.

And I called Sheila, and I said, "I'm gonna run something by you."

She said, "What?"

"Well," I said, "How about us doing a storyteller festival in Hampton?"

- 2011, I decided that I wanted there to be more storytelling, so I started Better Said Than Done, which is Northern Virginia's storytelling organization.

And then in 2018, I was invited to perform at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee.

And since then, I have been performing at festivals and libraries and schools and museums and all over the country.

- One of the wonderful things about having the Hampton Storytelling Festival this year is that it's the first festival of its kind that we're having in Hampton.

(audience laughs) And we are known in Hampton for having festivals but nothing quite like this.

And storytelling festivals tend to bring out people who want to hear and listen to something a little different.

- I know Jake Johnson, who's one of the organizers, and Sheila Arnold, who's one of the other organizers.

They've both performed at Better Said Than Done before.

And I guess when they were thinking of who to ask to be in the festival, they thought of me.

I wish I had a better answer, but it's really just up to the organizers who gets to perform and who doesn't, and so I was invited.

- Big Papa would come in every evening, and he'd hang that hat up on that hat nail.

He always said, "Don't let the sun beat you down.

Don't let nothing during the day beat you down that you don't enjoy coming home to the family."

- This is the first year of the Hampton Festival, the Hampton Storytelling Festival, and it's small but mighty.

I think that all of the programs have been just incredible.

You know, the ones that I'm in, I've gotten to watch as well because I'm not talking the whole time, and the performances have been great.

We've had a really engaged audience, and we had people who just sort of wandered in off the street 'cause they saw a sign who came to one event and then ended up coming to more of the events because they were hooked.

We had a few people who came to one event who said, "I wanna do this next year.

I wanna help, I want to tell.

I wanna volunteer."

So I think it's gonna grow, yeah.

(audience laughs) - I mean, people I'd never seen before, people from counties away, because the reason they were there is Cuz was legendary.

For 88 years he'd been doing everything that you're not supposed to do if you wanna have a funeral in a church, right?

I mean, he'd been out there fighting and cussing and swearing, just everything.

People wanted to know what the preacher could possibly say.

(audience laughs) - I want them to have just the feeling that they had a good time, and hopefully something that was in the story would spark them to think of a story of their own.

(light upbeat music) - Hi, welcome to "Curate Presents."

I'm Kayda Plus, and joining us today is a "Curate" alum artist from season two of "Curate," Spencer Tinkham.

Welcome, Spencer.

- Thank you.

It's so great to be here again.

- What have you been up to since 2017?

- So in 2017, my work was styled in more of an American folk art context using reclaimed and found materials.

And I've shifted into contemporary art, where the forms are a little bit more refined.

The finishes aren't aged.

- So your macro work is amazing.

Can you tell us a little bit about the process behind that?

- So it all started during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To entertain myself, I would take walks twice a day to try to keep my mind sharp.

And to keep from going insane, I would try to figure out what was different between the morning and afternoon walks.

And in particular to me, of course, the dropped bird feathers I just found fascinating and beautiful.

I was finally able to just slow down and really study and appreciate the structure and beauty in a single feather.

And that's what sparked my journey into creating what I call macro sculptures, which are like macro photography but in sculptural form.

And to create these works, I go to natural history museums.

I research specimens, bird specimens, with really interesting histories and backstories and narratives.

And I photograph these individual birds, and then I take this photo reference and turn them into sculptures.

- That seems very meticulous.

- It is.

It's a long process.

It's research, photography, drawing, sculpting, painting, so it covers the whole gamut.

- [Kayda] I can't even imagine.

Like, what are some of the things that the feathers are made of when you're sculpting them?

- So the feathers are all made out of wood, and they're painted in oil.

And one of my favorite characteristics of the macro sculptures is their optical qualities.

Each piece is an optical illusion.

The heightened texture will conceal or reveal colors.

So as you walk around the pieces, the pieces actually change in front of you on the walls.

- That is wild.

(laughs) - Yeah.

For wood in particular, it's a tough medium to create optical illusions.

It's a very solid medium that you can't see through.

So that's one of my favorite aspects, is the optical qualities of the works.

- Knowing more and more about your work it, I feel like it gives me more insight to look into it.

Like, when I'm looking at it now, I'm gonna see different things than I did before I knew these things today.

- Right, well, there's more that meets the eye in both my work and in nature.

And that's my biggest message that I'm trying to convey, is for people to slow down and to look at the familiar as if it's unfamiliar and see new beauty inside of it.

- Thanks for coming by and best of luck as you move forward in your career.

- Thank you so much.

- This week our "Curate U" feature is author Dominic Pistritto, who, with his family's help, spent much of his adolescence searching for his passion.

Having recently published his second book, it's apparent that his path was written.

(keyboard keys clacking) (soft mellow music) - [Dominic] There were a lot of challenges when I was little.

(keyboard keys clacking) It was really difficult to concentrate.

- He struggled in school, but we had to send him to Huntington Learning Center.

- [Dominic] I took summer school from first grade all the way up to fifth grade.

- (sighs) I did everything I could to help him out.

I made sure I spoke to every administrator or teacher because they didn't understand him.

I worked with him.

I had teachers work with him.

I was nonstop.

- I came to find out my best attribute was just creatively writing and making stuff up, and it's been pretty well so far.

Even though I may be slower, that's okay because that was a cocoon for what was to come years later.

(keyboard keys clacking) - He graduated high school, wound up going to TCC, got his associate's, and then he took up on the writing thing, which surprised us 'cause it just seemed like work that he might have wanted to avoid.

- The boy that wouldn't read.

- Yeah, he wouldn't read.

(Patty laughs) You could hand him any kind of Dr. Seuss book - Oh my gosh.

- Or anything like that.

- When I told them at the dinner table for the first time that I was writing a book, they looked at me like I had three heads, like, "What do you mean you're writing a book?

That was a very surreal moment because it was like right at that moment, my mom gave me a look of like all those years of putting me through the extra programs finally paid off.

My dad was a heavy inspiration for me.

He understands what it's like to struggle.

Watching him battle cancer was really hard to watch.

He's like a tank to me.

He just takes the blows, but he just keeps powering through, and I aspire to be like that as an author.

(keyboard keys clacking) (gentle mellow music) The first book was very much so just an experiment.

It wasn't designed to be the perfect book.

In my creative writing class at TCC, the class would start, and you would have people that would be brave enough to go up there and share what they had with the rest of the class.

I just started writing "The Marksman."

I went up there, and I shared.

Everyone in that class ripped it apart.

That memory pushes me.

If it's able to get people thinking, I know I plucked something.

And my second book, I wrote more so out of anger because now I was honed in.

"The Marksman" has been released.

What happens from here?

(keyboard keys clacking) "Project: Apex One" is about in the future, in the year 2083, the Great Pacific garbage patch has essentially spiraled out of control.

Trash is littered everywhere, and no one knows what to do with it.

So this aquatic foundation creates a creature to eat the plastic, but it gets out of control and turns back on the people that had created it.

One man that was a big inspiration for the second book was a guy named Mr. Dave Bradrick.

Mr. Dave Bradrick is a good family friend of ours.

- Look at the red crystal.

- He was like a second dad.

He served as a deep sea diver for over 30 years.

His garage is literally, it embodies who he is as a person 'cause you walk in there, and there's scuba tanks on the walls, figurines on every crevice, posters on every surface.

He even plopped an underwater welder mask on my lap that weighed almost half a ton.

- Helmet.

(family laughs) - He's gone to him for a lot of advice, listening to stories, which helps him with his stories.

- Some of the things I've done I wish I could do again, other things, I'm glad I survived it to be able to be here again because some of the stuff I did was so crazy that I don't know how I'm lucky enough to be here still.

- [Dominic] I dedicated the book to him because he was such a heavy proponent in that story.

- He handed me that, signed to me, and I teared up just like I'm doing now.

It meant more to me than I think he realized.

He touched my heart.

(gentle poignant music) (keyboard keys clacking) - I don't write these books for me.

I write these books for other people.

That's the hidden truth of being an author.

You don't do this for you.

You do this for your family and your friends.

The satisfaction of people seeing it and reading it and loving it, that's a feeling that only authors get to experience and artists too.

(skateboard clattering) - San Diego transplant Allegra DuChaine has left her mark around the world through her music and voiceover work.

- Well, lucky for us, she now calls Hampton Roads home.

Check out the music video for "Drive," a song about letting go and allowing love to lead the way.

- Thanks for watching.

- We'll see you next time on "Curate."

(gentle music) (engine revving) ♪ I suppose I should have noticed ♪ ♪ I had a reason, I had a purpose.

♪ ♪ But it wasn't what I made it out to be ♪ ♪ Suppose I should have noticed ♪ ♪ I had a habit of being impulsive ♪ ♪ And expecting it to turn out well for me ♪ ♪ But once again, my tender heart has stolen the keys ♪ ♪ And taken me out for a joy ride ♪ ♪ And I don't have a seatbelt ♪ ♪ So I'm holding on and letting it drive ♪ ♪ Ignoring the signs ♪ ♪ Hands at the wheel and my head's in the sky ♪ ♪ Letting it drive, running the lights ♪ ♪ Knowing the danger but not asking why ♪ ♪ Just letting it drive ♪ ♪ I suppose I should have noticed ♪ ♪ I had a feeling, but I ignored it ♪ ♪ Like I've done 100,000 times before ♪ ♪ I suppose I should have listened to what they were saying ♪ ♪ I should have believed them ♪ ♪ But it just felt so much easier to ignore ♪ ♪ But once again my tender heart has stolen the keys ♪ ♪ And taken me out for a joy ride ♪ ♪ Ride ♪ ♪ And I don't have a seatbelt, so I'm holding on ♪ ♪ And letting it drive, ignoring the signs ♪ ♪ Hands on the wheel and my head's in the sky ♪ ♪ Letting it drive, running the lights ♪ ♪ Knowing that danger but not asking why ♪ ♪ Just letting it drive ♪ ♪ Know there is risk, no sign of logic ♪ ♪ My heart's at the wheel ♪ ♪ Don't wanna stop it ♪ ♪ Know there is risk, no sign of logic ♪ ♪ My heart's at the wheel ♪ ♪ Don't wanna stop it ♪ ♪ So once again my tender has stolen the keys ♪ ♪ And taken me out for a joy ride ♪ ♪ I don't have a seatbelt, don't have a lifeline ♪ ♪ And I have no idea where it's taking me this time ♪ ♪ So I'm letting go ♪ ♪ Letting go ♪ ♪ Holding on and letting it drive ♪ ♪ Ignoring the signs, hands on the wheel ♪ ♪ And my head's in the sky ♪ ♪ Letting it drive, running the lights ♪ ♪ Knowing the danger but not asking why ♪ ♪ I suppose I should have noticed ♪ ♪ I had a reason, I had a purpose ♪ ♪ But it wasn't what I made it out to be ♪ (no audio)