A local band member and a senior at Walt Whitman High School will be among the musicians competing Friday as finalists in a local songwriting contest for an opportunity to win a cash prize and wider exposure.
Jason Byrd, a Bethesda resident and member of the local band South Rail, is vying for the grand prize in the Bernard/Ebb Songwriting Awards, and Madison Gestiehr, a senior at Walt Whitman High School, is a contender for the title of best young songwriter in the competition.
The finalists will perform at on 8 p.m. Friday at the Bethesda Blues & Jazz Super Club. Tickets are available for $10 for theater seats and $15 for cabaret-style seating. More than 600 people came last year. All the performers are paid, but the winner of the grand prize will receive $10,000, and the youth winner will come away with $2,500.
More than 600 people attended last year’s competition, which is held in the spirit of giving local artists a chance to break through to a bigger audience, said Cathy Bernard, a Bethesda resident and philanthropist who founded the contest.
In its second year, the competition is open to artists in Maryland, Washington and Virginia. Owen Danoff, a Washington songwriter who won last year’s grand prize, appeared Monday on the NBC singing competition The Voice.
The award is named after Bernard and her uncle Fred Ebb, a songwriter known for writing the lyrics for the musicals Chicago and Cabaret as well as the song “New York, New York,” from the 1977 Martin Scorsese movie of the same name.
Though Ebb was a prominent Broadway figure by the time he died in 2004, Bernard said he worked many years before becoming successful and would sympathize with others looking to make it big.
“He was very lucky. It took him a while but he made it,” Bernard said. “So my idea is to help give somebody a break, get something up on their career.”
Byrd, 41, has been playing guitar since he was a teenager and performed with a few bands around Charlotte, North Carolina, before settling in Bethesda in 2001. He said he now plays what he classifies as Americana rock with a roots element and a “blues, folky country tinge,” and toured the country with South Rail during the winter of 2015.
He’s submitted songs to contests before, but said he thinks local contests are even more important than national ones because they promote musicians in the area where they play.
“Contests like this help promote artists and musicians, so we get the word out that we have a vibrant music scene here,” Byrd said.
Gestiehr was just 8 eight years old when she gave her first musical performance. As part of a school variety show, she and her brother, Davis—who was 5 at the time—sang and pretended to play guitar.
They kept returning to perform the skit every year until she was in fifth grade, when Gestiehr decided to “play guitar for real,” she said.
Now, Gestiehr, 17, and her brother perform as Davison Duo, playing their blend of alternative rock pop in bars in the Bethesda and Washington, D.C., area. They have three songs on iTunes, and Gestiehr was also a finalist for the Bernard/Ebb Songwriting Awards last year.
For this year’s competition, preliminary judges combed through 225 entries to choose the six finalists for the general category and three for young songwriters, who are under 18.
Each contestant can perform up to two songs that they wrote and which made up their submission to the contest. The judges—a Berklee College of Music professor, a musical theater writer and a Nashville songwriter—will then choose a winner based on lyrics, music and performance.
Playing with his band, Byrd will perform two songs from previously recorded EPs. “Be That Way” and “Wide-Eyed Smile” are both “relationship songs,” Byrd said, the first about looking back at the early days of a relationship and the second about “being lifted up by the person you’re with” even when feeling down.
Gestiehr said she writes songs in a similar way—by finding the music first and letting the words come later. She was first inspired to write after a friend died of a rare form of liver cancer. Many of the duo’s songs are about that friend, including “I’m Not the One,” Gestiehr and her brother will perform Friday.
If she wins, Gestiehr plans to donate much of the money to Children’s National Medical Center in Washington in her friend’s name. In dealing with the sadness after her death, Gestiehr said she has found an outlet in music.
“I just thought, ‘Hey, maybe we should write a song about it and make something good out of this,’ ” she said.
