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Benefit concert brings family back together

Fairview at Riverclub concert on Nov. 27 will be a family affair

BY AARON RICHARDSON

Date published: 11/21/2009

BY AARON RICHARDSON

Guitarist Dave Cleveland will headline a benefit show, "An Evening of Thanksgiving and Hope," featuring his two sisters at Fairview at Riverclub in Spotsylvania on Nov. 27.

Cleveland will be performing songs from his new recording, "Hope in Motion," a collection of 12 instrumentals.

Cleveland's sister JC Mason, a Christian singer-songwriter from Fredericksburg, will host the show with Fairview at Riverclub's Worship Team.

"We really want to represent the Worship Team we have on Sunday mornings, then David will start heading it up," Mason said.

Mason set up the show to involve not only performances, but also testimonials by the performers.

"The goal is to give people a positive outlook when there's so much negative talk going on," said Mason, who also will be joined on stage with her sister, Kimber Cleveland.

Dave Cleveland, a Fredericksburg native, has been an active professional musician since 1991 and has gained national notoriety on the Christian music scene.

"It's very exciting," Dave Cleveland said of the family performance. "About half the time I think about it I start tearing up, because you start looking back at your life and they've been there the whole time."

On "Hope in Motion," he teamed up with three other musicians and recorded the album over 12 days. The musicians gathered to write a song in the morning, then recorded it that afternoon.

"Somebody comes up with a melody and we all start to throw in stuff and then nine hours later we have a new track," he explained. "We sort of said, 'God, we're going to trust you every morning, which way do you want us to go in?'"

The Nov. 27 show breaks new ground for Cleveland and his sisters. "It is actually the first time the three of us have played together as career musicians," Kimber Cleveland said.

While the Cleveland siblings grew up loving music together, their lives took them different directions.

"We did our own thing," Kimber said. "We developed different styles and identities. That's the way things went."

Kimber says her approach to her musical career differs from her siblings.

"I am not a Christian singer-songwriter," she said. "But I am a Christian who is a singer-songwriter." And she said God has been an inspiration in her music.

"For this concert I've chosen a song that I wrote about God being a foundation for me," she said.

She wrote the number after being robbed at gunpoint.

"I usually don't write a song in two hours," she said. "But this one just flowed out of me."

Mason said she was excited to perform with her siblings with her regular congregation. The church off Tidewater Trail, which opened in 2007, is an expansion of Fair-view Baptist Church in Fredericksburg.

"It's going to be neat to share this part of my life with them, and to show that our lives aren't perfect," she said.

The event begins at 7 p.m. on Nov. 27, admission is two nonperishable food items to be donated to the Fredericksburg Area Food Bank.

Aaron Richardson: 540/374-5000, ext. 5617
Email: arichardson@freelancestar.com

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Date published: 11/21/2009