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The Charlotte Optimist
Jul 28, 2026
Let's Build a Bridge
Let's Build a Bridge
00:00
18:24
Transcript
0:01
Let's build a bridge. The man trying to rebuild trust in Charlotte by Michael Graf, photography by Logan Cyrus. The poet's dreaming up metaphors. The songwriter's scribbling in a notebook.
0:16
The harpist is making rain sounds on his strings. The producer is tapping the keyboard and capturing it all. They're creating a song for Charlotte, tentatively called Together We Build.
0:27
The sax player's here too, but he forgot his sax today, so he's bringing the laughs. It gives me Free Willy feelings, Harvey Cummings says after hearing the initial hook.
0:38
Then he starts clapping and humming Michael Jackson's Will You Be There, the famous track from the 1993 film. The artists crack up, but Harvey insists it's not a joke. He means it as a compliment.
0:50
When I say that, it's like hopeful, he says. It's a core memory song. You can see that whale jumping.
0:59
We're in a windowless basement studio in Uptown, beneath the busy streets on a blistering mid-July afternoon, all because one man asked us to be here. You want to take a risk with me? Daly Arrington had said to everyone.
1:13
The people in the studio, some of our city's more accomplished local artists, said yes before knowing what he wanted from them. No questions asked.
1:24
They just knew that when Daly has a vision, he tends to turn it into something. This might be his dreamiest idea yet.
1:32
He's mounting a public campaign to build relationships and trust between people who run Charlotte, from politicians to C-suiters to developers to activists to nonprofit leaders,
1:43
and by extension foster trust between the institutions they run and the general public. It's a worthy, if wishful, mission.
1:51
Gallup released its annual Trust in Institutions report this month, which shows confidence at or near record lows in nearly every category. Daly, though, has a distinct background and set of skills.
2:06
He's a Grammy-nominated former music producer who spent the past five years teaching leadership across differences with his Bridge Builder business.
2:15
The day we met in the studio, he posted a vision essay for this new project.
2:20
In it, he argues that the city's recent quarrels stem from leaders who don't know and trust each other, and says that's a natural byproduct of the city's rapid growth.
2:29
At the end, he included 30 testimonials from notable leaders across multiple industries and invited others to add their voice.
2:39
We're leaving value on the table that our city desperately needs, Daly told me over breakfast one morning. If we want our growth to be different, to be healthier, the same ways of going about it are not going to work.
2:51
I don't believe I'm alone in thinking these things. I'm just creating opportunities for others to say yes. Daly knows that sounds vague,
3:00
and so Charlotte's, and he knows Charlotte's launched plenty of well-intentioned efforts that ended as conversations, and he'll tell you his could join them. So he wanted to create an example, a microcosm, through music.
3:14
He leaned back to his recording days. His daughters joke that he's a retired rapper, and tapped into his old connections to curate a cast of eight artists with different specialties.
3:25
In one chair on the first day of recording is Blues Rogers, an Emmy-winning spoken word poet who's coached national slam champions.
3:33
In another is Emily Sage, a multidisciplinary artist whose songs have millions of Spotify plays and who's now building art from whispers. There's harpist Joseph Kiesau,
3:47
who earned a master's degree from Harvard and has roots in the Philippines and Puerto Rico.
3:52
Producer and keyboardist Curtis Keyes, who built the studio we're in, describes his style as Marvin Gaye meets Frank Ocean with Southern charm.
4:01
And of course, there's Harvey Cummings, the celebrated jazz artist who once was asked to go on tour with none other than Prince.
4:09
Joining later in the week will be percussionist Claudio Ortiz and keyboard player Lisa Ortiz, a well-known brother and sister combination who've been pushing Latin sounds in Charlotte for years.
4:23
Also part of the collaboration will be soul singer-songwriter Aji, who was a background vocalist for Fantasia. At the beginning of the first session, Daly tossed out a word he's been thinking about, ecotones.
4:39
They're places where multiple ecosystems meet, like estuaries, to create life that's only possible with the combination.
4:48
Daly grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, which happens to be near the mouth of one of the country's largest ecotones, the Chesapeake Bay, where a mix of saltwater and freshwater produces an abundance of wildlife.
5:00
Point being, Daly likes the idea that certain things can only exist in places where multiple worlds come together.
5:09
The fact that I can reach out to y'all and say, hey, take a risk with me, and y'all are like, okay, without fully knowing what the risk is, I think it's a testament to the relationships and trust that exists, Daly tells the group.
5:21
Imagine if that could happen in the government center, in our corporations, our nonprofits, our schools. It seems pretty cloud-bound until you consider what's at stake.
5:35
We've been writing for several months about how Charlotte's stumbling through an era of leadership turnover.
5:41
The mayor just retired early, and several prominent institutions, Foundation for the Carolinas, CMPD, Charlotte Ballet, Crisis Assistance Ministry, Habitat for Humanity, the Charlotte Observer, Discovery Place, Arbridge for Kids, have had or are facing leadership transitions.
6:00
Meanwhile, we're encountering critical issues that will shape the future for generations.
6:04
When City Council returns from its July recess next month, they'll be pressing on whether to revisit the I-77 toll lanes proposal, how to address data centers, and what to do about a new state law that could end their 30-year initiative of requiring minority and women-owned businesses be included in government contracts.
6:24
Decisions that all have wide-reaching implications on who benefits from Charlotte's growth and who doesn't.
6:32
Trust is hard to hold because reasons to be cynical are so readily available and easily understood and shareable.
6:39
When Axios revealed last week that one of the potential I-77 developers had been pitching the project to investors as lucrative back in May,
6:47
certainly toll lanes opponents saw reason to doubt that the bidding process would be competitive. When the YMCA announced it would sell the Morrison branch to a church,
6:58
it was only natural for people to protest and question why. Complicating matters on council, several current members are considering runs for mayor in 2027 and will want to raise their individual profiles.
7:09
It's hard to make music if a bunch of people want to sing solo. National political conversations, meanwhile, are emphasizing wealth gaps.
7:18
Locally, that's translated into a simplistic but alluring storyline about, quote, the business community versus, quote, the people. I've had countless conversations about this over the past few months.
7:30
I know people on both, quote, sides. And few people could articulate why the framing bothers me better than Daly did. It's because you have all these relationships, he told me one morning last month.
7:42
He's trying to foster more of these with this initiative. When you move beyond one silo to another, yes, there's friction. There's a lack of understanding. There's difficulty in that transition.
7:53
But there's also opportunity to understand this silo and the people who exist in it rather than I assume or I heard and I know, he said. Some folks do this already. County Commission Chair Mark Jarrell is an example.
8:08
He said in a recent R&D in the NC podcast that he's fortunate to go into rooms with the grass tops and the grassroots, as he puts it. He tries to carry one side's perspective into the other side's rooms.
8:21
At the grass tops, he says he's seen a disconnect. Not because they're bad people, not because they don't care about community. Their lives are just different.
8:31
And at the grassroots, Jarrell says he tells folks there's opportunities to stop judging people because I know people want to help when they can. Being that bridge is something I love.
8:43
And that's also the space Daly operates in. He's worked with everyone from executive to entry levelers, and he has three kids, two teenagers and a four-year-old.
8:54
The more we've talked, the more I've come to believe he's not necessarily trying to bridge gaps between different wealth classes or across races or political parties.
9:03
He's trying to build a path for people to move beyond seeing someone's identity to seeing their character.
9:09
The first studio session opens with Kurt Keyes, his real name is Curtis Hayes, playing a draft of the song's hook, which he'd created the previous night after digesting Daly's vision.
9:20
Then Kurt turns to the room, all these artists with their own special talents, and says he wants to see where they take it. I'm just going to get the drums going and we can just vibe, Keyes says.
9:30
My manifesto is nothing's whack, things are just misplaced. Blues Rogers, the poet, is the first to speak up.
9:39
He'd entered the room a blank canvas, he says, and within 15 minutes he'd drafted a 166-word poem that set the tone for the rest of the project. It includes the lines,
9:52
When the trusses of trust are broken, when the commute to heal community is taking too long, let's build a bridge.
9:59
A brave one, an audacious construction designed with love, engineered with hope, that carries us over the currents of troubled waters.
10:07
It was refreshing to me, and surprising, to see artists throw imperfect and unedited works out into the air, and to see them be received without judgment.
10:17
Emily Sage shares what she has in her notebook, then leaves the room to write. When she returns, she and Kurt lock in a conversation about how the song progresses.
10:26
Kurt says the song's hook, which is about a completed bridge, is the solution to the challenge Daly has posed to them.
10:35
Emily agrees that the lyrics should build toward that, to, quote, leave us a path for having the chorus be like the resolution. Later, Emily tells us about her new whisper project.
10:45
She's working with new mothers, asking them to whisper their wishes for their babies into a mic. She's putting the recordings together, individual whispers talking all over each other. Kurt loves the idea.
10:57
They decide before we leave, each of us in the room must whisper our hopes for our city into the mic. One by one, we all do so. Photographer Logan Cyrus and I even contributed. Each of us barely louder than a breath.
11:12
When you hear the finished song, listen closely to what sounds like ambient noise under the music. You might mistake it for static, but that's us. It's like the sweetest version of yourself, Kurt says.
11:26
The session ends with Emily singing the hook by herself with Kurt recording. I've tried to find a way to describe Emily's voice in soundless text, and the best I can come up with is this.
11:38
You know how it feels to sway in a hammock on a nice day? She sounds like whatever that feeling is. Let's build a bridge, she sings to close the recording session. Let's build it strong.
11:50
David Daly Arrington calls his life story a journey from the corner to the cul-de-sac. He was a black kid from a black neighborhood in Norfolk.
11:59
He remembers piling into a station wagon with his family for church on Sundays. He had a decent but strained relationship with his father.
12:06
During his senior year at Granby High School in 2000 He led the basketball team to a state championship. His father came up to him after the game and said he was proud of him.
12:17
That was one of the only times I remember him telling me that, Arrington had told me several years ago. The fact that he would choose that moment to say he was proud of me because of basketball?
12:30
Daly stopped playing the game competitively after that. His uncle lived in Ballantine and had a car detailing business.
12:38
Daly enrolled at the Art Institute of Charlotte and moved from Norfolk, the corner, to South Charlotte, the cul-de-sac. Soon he got his own place with two roommates, both white. They became his closest friends.
12:51
On weekends, one of them asked Daly if he wanted to go take jet skis out on a lake with his family. Daly told the guy that wasn't normal for him. The roommates, in turn, saw in Daly traits that weren't normal to them.
13:03
He wolfed down food, and when they asked him why, he said it was because his siblings always ate new boxes of cereal before he could get to them. He turned to church and art.
13:12
Many Sundays he was the only black person on the church stage, and the organizations celebrated the fact that he brought diversity. That's how, he says, he learned the difference between being welcomed and being valued.
13:24
He became deeply engaged with Charlotte's arts community, meeting funders and wealthy philanthropists along the way. He kept building those relationships, kept being curious.
13:36
A few years ago, he and I were planning to have coffee, and he insisted on coming to my house instead of the coffee shop. And he tells the musicians, that's the goal.
13:44
Not a water cooler relationship, he says, and I can come over to your crib, kick my feet up on your couch relationship.
13:52
The 2016 police killing of Keith Lamont Scott and the 2020 George Floyd protests forced organizations around town to consider diversity in the workplace.
14:02
Daly worried that it would lead to companies checking boxes, so he cooked up a bridge builder consulting practice, and top companies asked him to come in and talk about the difference between welcomed and valued.
14:16
In 2022, he launched a YouTube show called Bridge Builder Conversations, in which he interviewed leaders like former Bank of America CEO Hugh McCall, former Mayor Harvey Gantt, and others, exploring who they were beyond the Wikipedia highlights.
14:32
He parlayed that into a leadership development program.
14:36
Each cohort has a dozen or so participants, and Daly curates the groups based on what he knows about the individuals, so that he can have a range of backgrounds and opinions.
14:47
His larger hope is that the participants take what they've learned about themselves and about others back to their leadership roles at work.
14:56
Daly's favorite proof of what's possible is the relationship built between nonprofit veteran Colin Pinkney and Carolina Coe, a Bank of America executive who was new to the city when she joined the first cohort.
15:09
They got to know each other outside of the meetings, and Colin eventually invited Carolina onto his board at the Harvest Center. Months later, Carolina introduced Colin to Bank of America President Keith Cockrell.
15:21
Cockrell wound up participating in Charlotte Ballet's Dancing with the Stars of Charlotte, raising nearly $100,000 for the Harvest Center.
15:31
Ain't no way that Colin's going to walk up to Carolina and say, hey, you work at Bank of America, right? Can you get Keith Cockrell to support our work? Daly told me. That ain't going to happen.
15:41
It's an illustration of people taking the time and intentionally knowing one another.
15:46
I attended a graduation ceremony for Bridge Builder cohort last year, and the participants ranged from media leaders to public employees to nonprofits.
15:55
They closed the session with a song, Jack Garrett's Surprise Yourself.
16:00
Two days after the first studio session, we're back again, this time with Liza Ortiz and Claudio Ortiz, the Puerto Rico-born siblings who were raised by a Puerto Rican mother and a Venezuelan father.
16:12
Kurt plays some of what he recorded in the first session, then Daly looks at Claudio and asks him if he can add something that would connect with Charlotte's Latin community.
16:21
Claudio gently corrects him that there's no such thing as a singular Latin sound, especially not in Charlotte. A Dominican will have a different rhythm to like mine, Claudio says.
16:33
Of course, Daly says, you tell me what it should sound like. Claudio tosses an egg shaker to Blues, the poet, and starts tapping on the drum.
16:43
That's, in a way, what Daly hopes to do with this next phase of Bridge Builder.
16:47
Take an idea he has on how to build trust among leaders, use the tools he's learned through his leadership development work, and see where they take it.
16:57
By the end of the six hours we spent together over two days, everyone's contributed what they do best, even if it's just a whisper. Whether the song gets 10 views or 10 million, it's theirs.
17:09
Joseph Kiesel puts on headphones and tickles his harp toward the mic. Kurt hits a button on the computer sending sounds into the headphones and Kiesel says, oh, it's looping, with boyish excitement.
17:23
On the couch, Harvey Cummings picks up a 1954 sax and belts out notes that will be layered in. Kurt's floating on a suite of files by sunset. All this is a journey, he says.
17:35
One of the last pieces of the day is from Liza. She's creating loops on the keyboard. She's self-taught and plays by ear, not by reading music.
17:44
So she locks in with Kurt and the rest of us are left to watch in awe as he guides her into the beat with him. At one point, she gets worried. Do we lose a little bit of the hopefulness with the minor?
17:58
Kurt says that's traditionally the case, but with the right pairing, B-flat minor doesn't have to be dark at all. Nah, over C-sharp, it can still be happy, Kurt says. It can still be some kind of release.
18:12
They keep going and she winces whenever she stumbles on a note, but Kurt keeps encouraging until everything comes together. Nothing's whack, he says louder now as Liza nails it.
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