By Casey Gillis

Published: March 19, 2008

It’s Friday night, and Jamal Williams is surveying the crowd gathered at The Mezzanine Performance Gallery and Café during “Friday Night Live,” a variety show he co-hosts with Sonia Langhorne.

His sights settle on Katrina Boyd, who is sitting front and center on one of the venue’s pale pink couches. Before the show began, he’d gotten a tip that she could sing like R&B songstress Lauryn Hill.

Microphone in hand, the lanky Williams kneels beside Boyd and tries to convince her to sing a note or two.

“You don’t gotta get up,” he says, pointing the mic her way. “Just let me hear something.”

His sweet-talking does the trick, and Boyd breaks into an a cappella rendition of “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee.”

After Boyd is done, Langhorne jumps up and hugs her.

“Oh my gosh, that was beautiful,” she says, pulling Boyd from her seat to take a proper bow. “Get up here.”

The minds behind The Mezzanine — Lynchburg residents Tony Camm, Lew Taylor and Michelle Johnson — hope that kind of spontaneity happens there on a regular basis.

“That’s what we’re looking for to happen every Friday,” Camm says. “That same kind of magic.”

The trio took over The Mezzanine, located downtown at 720 Commerce St., last month. They’ve since formed The Artists Collective, a group of artists, musicians and performers who want to preserve and promote live and visual artistic performances in Lynchburg.

Taylor, a well-known area musician and member of the jazz band Jazmine, says he sees The Mezzanine as a place where all the different arts can come together.

“The other artists groups tend to be, to a lesser or greater degree, exclusive,” he says. “In my mind, they don’t cross paths as much as I would like (to see in) the artistic community. Here, this is the crossroads for all artists of all stripes and all disciplines.”

“The thing I like about it is what can come out of it,” he adds. “There are no barriers here. There are no fences around what we’re doing here. It’s open to everybody.”

For an example, he cites their March 1 opening night, when his mother got up and sang Etta James’ “At Last” in front of the standing-room-only crowd. Later, a young local musician played an indie rock original on acoustic guitar. And Taylor, also a member of The House Band with Camm, played a few tunes as well.

“You have to be here to even conceive what’s going on,” Taylor says. “In my opinion, the revitalization of downtown will not start with a high-end hotel at the end of the block. It won’t start by herding people downtown. It will start by people wanting to go downtown.”

To get people down there and into The Mezzanine, the Artists Collective has organized two weekly events: “Friday Night Live” and “Saturday Night Open Stage,” both of which start at 8 p.m.

Camm says he envisioned “Live” to be a combination of MTV’s “Total Request Live,” BET’s “106 & Park” and HBO’s “Def Poetry Jam.”

Williams and Langhorne got involved early on, when both were working with Camm on a Black Theatre Ensemble production.

“I said, ‘You guys take it, and it’s your baby,’” Camm says. “Jamal and Sonia are such outgoing personalities.”

Every week at “Live,” the goal is to have one singer, one poet, one spoken word artist and one comedian perform 25-minute sets each. In between, Williams and Langhorne will continue to put unsuspecting audience members on the spot. They’ll also perform themselves — Williams is a singer/rapper, and Langhorne is a poet.

“We wanted to set it up like a variety show,” where any genre is welcome, Williams says. “I don’t like separation. I’m from Atlantic City, New Jersey. Everybody’s mixed with everybody, and I think that’s how it should always be.”

Last weekend saw the aforementioned performance by Katrina Boyd, who later sang “Killing Me Softly” with friend Adrienne Dodson.

Other performers included a gospel singer/rapper and a band called Me, Mike and the Machine.

The group — made up of brothers Beau and Mike Dodson (no relation to Adrienne) — records drums, vocals, bass lines, guitar and other sound effects onto a portable digital recording studio. At live shows, they hook it up to a P.A. system, and Beau raps or sings along to the recorded track while Mike plays bass, as if they had a full band on stage.

Beau Dodson says he loves what The Mezzanine is all about.

“It certainly brings a lot of people together, (and) it’s definitely a nice scene for downtown. It’s what you expect to see downtown,” he says. “It’s a little more refreshing than having to go to a bar.”

Williams says they’re going to try to have a comedian finish “Live” every week, so “you’re laughing as you walk out the door.”

Walk in on a Friday night, and you could easily mistake Williams and Langhorne for the comedy act. The two tease each other good-naturedly, like brother and sister, throughout the show. But it’s obvious there’s mutual respect, especially when Williams encourages Langhorne to read one of her poems or when Langhorne talks Williams into performing one of his songs.

And they both like to shine the spotlight on others.

“I hope that, in some way, we can shed some light on Lynchburg and all these wonderful, talented people we have here,” Langhorne says.

“It’s free-flowing and very relaxed,” she adds. “We want (the audience) to sit back and expand their mind. They get it all, and they get it all in one place. That’s what we’re here for.

“I don’t think we ever know what we’re going to get, and that’s the beauty of it.”

The Saturday night events will be even less structured than “Live.” The past two weekends have seen performances by The House Band and Jazmine. This week, it will be more of an open mic night, where “musicians can come in and have a jam session, all impromptu and unrehearsed,” Camm says.

For all the performances, there are three rules: no drinking, no smoking and no profanity.

Camm, Taylor and Johnson want The Mezzanine to be a place where everyone is welcome. They see it as a way to expose younger people, who can’t get into bars to hear live music, to the arts.

“I’m gratified to see the amount of people who want to support a place that’s alcohol-free and smoke-free,” Taylor says. “There’s a constituency out there that doesn’t want to go to a bar where people get unruly.”

This latest venture isn’t Camm’s first time utilizing the Mezzanine’s space, which is next door to Dance Theatre of Lynchburg and is owned by the organization.

A few years ago, he operated Café 720 there. At the time, they’d host live music on weekends, which attracted a regular crowd, he says. But he and his business partners eventually gave it up to focus on other projects.

“The second I left, I’ve been looking back ever since,” Camm says.

Several other folks operated the café after Camm, and it was eventually renamed The Mezzanine. In January, Camm heard that Dance Theatre’s board was looking to lease it again, and he felt like his time had come to go back.

The idea for the Artists Collective had been floating around, and with the building available, the timing seemed perfect.

“With this opportunity (to lease The Mezzanine), it would be almost criminal to not let it happen,” Taylor says.

“I have worked for decades as a professional musician, and I have never been as excited about anything in my career as I’m excited about this.”

Taylor’s sister, Michelle Johnson, runs the café, which is open for lunch and dinner.

Johnson says the first “Friday Night Live” event, which was held March 7, amazed her.

“There were so many cultures (and) different backgrounds (there),” she says. “It just sort of created this ripple effect. It just went through the room, and everybody felt that same feeling.

“It creates (an atmosphere) that’s so dynamic that if I walk in here in a bad mood, it disappears.”

Right now, Camm and Taylor say there are no plans to host live music nights during the week. But they have other ideas for the space, including a movie night and an open forum called “Talk It Out!,” which will allow for discussions about politics, religion and other issues.

They also want to utilize The Mezzanine’s walls as a gallery for local artists’ paintings and photography.

“It’s endless what can be done in this space,” Camm says. “There’s something for everybody. Problem is, we’re going to run out of Friday and Saturday nights. We’re going to have to have something every night.”