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I'm an independent artist - a pianist, composer, producer, filmmaker, writer and visual artist - living in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the USA. 
Very very fortunate to have worked recently with two of the world's great pianists: Walter Norris, called the greatest living jazz pianist, and Pinetop Perkins, called the greatest living blues pianist. I narrated Pinetop's official authorized film biography, Born in the Honey: The Pinetop Perkins Story, nominated for a 2008 National Blues Award. I also edited and mastered Pinetop's On the 88s: Live in Chicago, which was nominated for a 2008 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album.

In 2003 I began making a documentary about Walter Norris. It stunned me that a musician of his ability was not more well-known. I've not only had the opportunity to get to know Walter well, but I've been able to watch him practice and teach for hours, to spend time in his home in Berlin, to go to his concerts and lectures, to hear rare recordings, to meet his family and friends, and (probably my favorite thing) to have private conversations with him, particularly about the art of playing the piano. A 2 hr long rough cut was premiered in May 2009 at the Clinton Center (presidential library). Once some changes are made it'll go to festivals and DVD.

Right now (Aug 09) I'm finishing a documentary about blues artist Bobby Rush, featuring Bobby "Blue" Bland, Lonnie Brooks, Willie Mitchell, Charles Evers (brother of Medgar Evers), Eddie Clearwater, Duwayne Burnside (son of R L Burnside), Bubba Sullivan and Steven Seagal. It premieres October 23 at the 2009 Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival.

I feel like I've lived several very different lives. My first "career" was playing in a Christian rock band, based in Nashville, TN. We were very successful at the time but not many people remember now. After that I became an independent producer and made music for a crazy wide range of people and situations through the 80s and 90s. I've made all kinds of music, from the far right of the mainstream to the radically experimental far left. To make life a little more surreal, I was a consultant to Miss America contestants for over 20 years. If you can't decide which earrings to wear with your new gown, jus lemme know.


I do a lot of studying and writing. I competed for the National Championship of Slam Poetry (1998 in Chicago) and one of my performances there was featured on the CBS program "Sixty Minutes." I recently wrote an essay for Hammock that's being used to promote their new album, Maybe They Will Sing For Us Tomorrow. I'm in the process of writing a long essay about the history of jazz piano. I also write short stories. You can read some things at my Writing page.

In January of 2006 I opened a gallery - The Gallery@404B (see the Art page) - to show artwork made by younger artists of the Hot Springs art community. In August of 2007 I hosted the official after party for the United States premier of Riceboy Sleeps, honoring Jonsi Birgisson (Sigur Ros) and Alex Somers, and featuring the world live premier of Hammock. For that we were written up in some major art and music magazines. The gallery has also had nice coverage in the New York Daily News and Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Now several galleries exist here that are dedicated to the young artists.

In 2001 I was appointed by then-Governor Mike Huckabee (R) to serve on the board of the Arkansas Entertainer's Hall of Fame, and was recently re-appointed by Government Mike Beebe (D) to serve another seven years. Being on this board has allowed me to do some really meaningful things, like standing to induct the singer Lefty Frizzell and the actor Tess Harper.

I live about five blocks from the place I was born, in the middle of one of America's oldest National Parks. I like the idea of living in a small town yet doing work that's globally recognized. More and more I find myself thinking about the suffering people in the world and I'm bothered that so many of us can sit in nice restaurants ordering wine at $8 a glass when there are children dying because their parents can't afford food or medicine. I hope to get more active about this kind of thing in the near future.

Photo by Gil Poe

20 Questions

Updated August 13, 2009

Q1: What was the last piece of music you heard?
CD: I went to sleep last night with Scarface's Emeritus playing on the laptop next to my head, but I don't remember what song I heard last.

Q2: What was the last quotation you used?
CD: "Failure doesn't exist in the past." I made it up. For a friend.

Q3: What was the last myspace page you visited?
CD: My music page (www.myspace.com/chuckdodsonmusic).

Q4: What was the last major decision you made?
CD: I dunno. Like what shirt to wear today? I helped someone else make a big decision a couple of days ago: I talked the producer of a movie I'm working on into cutting the length down quite a bit. I convinced him that it'd be a better movie if it was shorter and I finally won out. I felt really good about that.

Q5: What was the last thing you ate?
CD: Breakfast. Banana nut muffin. And for coffee I mixed Cuvee Holy Roast (Austin TX) beans with Starbuck's Sumatra beans.

Q6: What was the last movie you watched from start to finish?
CD: That's tough because it's getting more and more rare that I do that. It might've been Bruno, because I saw that in a theater. Anymore it's hard for me to sit through an entire movie at home. I'm just too conditioned to quickly move on to the next thing. You know?

Q7: What was the last call made from your cell phone?
CD: I'll have to look... because I haven't made a call since yesterday... (looking at his phone). It was to my friend Alexandra.

Q8: What was the last thing you created?
CD: Yesterday I remade some of the titles for the Bobby Rush movie, titles for the opening sequence.

Q9: What is the last thing you threw away?
CD: The packet Andy's (the cat) breakfast came in.

Q10: What is the last book you read from?
CD: DADA: Zurich Berlin Hannover Cologne New York Paris by Leah Dickerman.

Q11: What future event are you most excited about?
CD: Lunch.

Q12: What is your greatest irrational fear?
CD: Being attacked and eaten by a lion.

Q13: What was your last 'aha' moment?
CD: Yesterday morning I woke up and knew immediately that I'd had too many drinks the night before. Aha.

Q14: What was your most recent act of guilty pleasure?
CD: Browsing through one of Adrianne Curry's myspace photo albums.

Q15: Where did your last email go?
CD: To a gentleman in Atlanta who'd written to me about Walter Norris.

Q16: What was the last live performance you attended?
CD: I saw this band from Cleveland Tuesday night at Maxine's.

Q17: What was the last thing you bought for your home?
CD: Three matching chairs. I think they came from a salon. I got them for $2.90 each at Goodwill.

Q18: What was the last article of clothing you bought?
CD: I think it was maybe a couple of shirts. Do glasses count?

Q19: What was the last video you watched online?
CD: Frank Bruni's review of Eleven Madison Park at the New York Times site. Wait... no, that was a slide show. The last video I watched was of Les Paul demonstrating the Les Paulverizer. He died this morning.

Q20: What's your message to the world for today?
CD: Gimme five dolla n I pawk yo cah.


Interviews

What do you do most days?

No two days are quite the same. I uploaded video until about 3 o'clock this morning. It was of an interview I did with Walter Norris. Then I went to sleep and I got up about 9 or 9:30. I looked at emails and checked a couple of my websites, made coffee, and I watched a couple of documentaries on YouTube. One was "Father Time," about Art Blakey, and the other was some clips of Cecil Taylor. Then I went to work on my movie about Walter. And I take breaks to check email and make calls and eat and see what's going on in the world and whatever. I usually cook at least once a day.

Do you do all your work at home?

Yes. I've got a room with my music and video gear at one end of the building, then I've got another room where I do my online business and my writing. The kitchen's in the middle of the apartment so I'm never far away from food and drinks. I like it. My mother always taught piano lessons in our home. I grew up with that and so it's always been a natural thing for me to get up in the morning and go to work without leaving the house.

Do you turn off the phone?

Only when I'm recording with mics. The rest of the time I just don't answer it.

What about your art gallery? How much of your time does that take?

I only open the gallery one night a month, so it's not that bad. It takes a couple of days to get ready to open. On those days we're cleaning and hanging the show, deciding what goes where and making sure we have all the prices and titles and artist bios and whatever. Actually the thing that takes the most time is doing the publicity. Every month I do newspaper and magazine publicity and send out quite a few emails to announce the shows. And then there's another day to clean up the mess.

Your gallery is kind of a new style of gallery. It's almost virtual.

Almost. It does exist in real space-time, it's just a little more cloistered than most other galleries. It definitely has a bigger life in the magazines than it does in the brick-and-mortar realm.

Do you ever suffer from an identity crisis, from doing so many different kinds of things - being a musician, a filmmaker, a writer, running a gallery...?

To a degree. Sometimes I remember that for most of my life I was trying so hard to be a successful musician, doing all the things young musicians think it takes to get the attention of the labels, and when I think back to those days I feel so free with the life I have now because I'm doing what I want to do the way I want to do it. I've come to see that the identity crisis is my identity. I live at the edge of chaos, in that place between the ordered, organized life and being a total out-of-control mess. It's hard to stay consistently at the edge of chaos, but that's the place that has the most potential for making really innovative things happen.

Do you have a plan for the future?

I don't really plan for the future much, except in terms of getting work done. One of my friends tried to get me to establish goals, like 'where do you see yourself in five years, in ten years,' and I just started laughing because I couldn't think that way. I'll tell you something I've noticed about myself. I have a fascinating disinterest in my own past. It's almost like my own past depresses me. I live for this present moment and all the moments that will come. All my milestones, all the things I'm most excited about, are ahead of me. So when I work, when I think, it's with an optimism, expecting the future to be a very bright place. I expect to be defined by my future, not by my past. I'm who I'm becoming, not who I was.

Excerpt of interview recorded Thursday, June 19, 2008

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