The self-taught singer and sculptor from Alabama exists in a state of constant, spontaneous creativity. He talks about his roots and his new project with Artangel, inspired by Orford Ness
RESTON, VA (PRWEB) October 28, 2021 The National Association for Music Education (NAfME) Student Composers Competition spotlights original music written by
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Cleveland Grover Meredith, Jr., who goes by Cleve, grew up in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. His father owns a hundred-year-old company that makes utility poles, and his mother was a homemaker who later became an interior decorator. He had two sisters, one of whom died young, of brain cancer. He attended the prestigious Lovett School, in north Atlanta, where nearly all his classmates were white, and where, a few of those classmates told me recently, the N-word was occasionally heard in the hallways making it “depressingly similar,” one said, to many schools in the area at the time. Meredith was an upbeat kid. One of his classmates, Dean Temple, who is now a stage actor, recalled a class trip to the U.S. Capitol. Most of the details were fuzzy, Temple said, but he could still recall “the smile on Cleve’s face.”