Everyone knows about LEAF. Now, Jennifer Pickering’s job is to push it even further.

by Mick Kelly . photos by Matt Rose

A-list musicians swing through Asheville every day. They step down from their airplanes or busses, play a festival or The Orange Peel, and then climb back onto the bus. Asheville native Jennifer Pickering booked many of those A-listers way back in 1995 when she first started the Lake Eden Arts Festival. They’d wheel a band bus out to Camp Rockmont in Black Mountain, play a show and then leave. But a few years in, it dawned on her: “We had such amazing people coming for a day or a weekend,” she says. “I thought—we have to get them out in the community more.”

You’d think Pickering, who’s 44, would have her hands full simply running the festival. LEAF, a four-day affair each spring and fall in Black Mountain, is one of the premier music events in Western North Carolina. Past performers include everyone from Doc Watson to Nanci Griffith to Arrested Development and the Indigo Girls. There are multi-cultural and New Age activities aplenty at LEAF, from belly dance demos to shamanic bodywork. The complete music lineup has a distinctly global feel. Venezuelan acid jazz artists play alongside cloggers and Senegalese guitarists. “It feels a bit European,” says folk rocker Sarah Lee Guthrie, who’s played LEAF three times (once with her dad, Arlo Guthrie). She’ll perform there again with her husband Johnny Irion later this month. “It’s refreshing to see people dive into different cultures...It’s one of the best fests in the country.”

Now, after producing 31 festivals in 16 years, Pickering is at something of a crossroads. Her whole life has revolved around Lake Eden, a small private lake about 15 miles East of Asheville. Her father ran a summer camp operation there, Camp Rockmont, on the 500 acres surrounding the lake, until the 1980s. Her family still lives on property near Lake Eden. After college at Vanderbilt and Wake Forest, Pickering herself ran a girls’ summer camp, Camp Hollymont, at the Asheville School. When she sold the camp, at age 27, she used the cash to fund the first LEAF. Several years later, she married one of LEAF’s sponsors, Leigh Maher, then an executive at the magazine Global Rhythm (he now does LEAF’s financial and database work).

Now, the music fest doesn’t really have room to expand, Pickering says. She can’t add more acts, only better ones. “We don’t have room to grow per se, but we do want to keep bringing in music that people haven’t heard of, and art that people haven’t seen,” she says. This fall, thanks to an NEA grant, LEAF’s lineup will include the Grammy award-winning African American a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock. (LEAF’s three full-time staffers line up music for each festival on a budget of about $140,000, Pickering says.)

But she does have room to expand in different directions, which is where she’s putting her energy. In 1997, Pickering asked Grammy-winning Asheville banjo picker David Holt to do a workshop in a Black Mountain elementary school—a total hit. “We couldn’t sustain that, but we realized we wanted to do more of it,” she says of his performance. By 2004, Pickering made LEAF into a nonprofit and started the program LEAF in Schools and Streets, which brings artists and teachers into Western North Carolina schools and public housing projects. Now, drummers like Imhotep and the hip-hop artist Michael Hayes make regular appearances in Asheville-area high schools, middle schools and public housing projects like Klondyke, DeaverView, Burton Street and Pisgah View.

Pickering has a special place in her heart for Klondyke Homes in Montford. Growing up at Camp Rockmont, she connected with Bertha Gilliam, one of the camp cooks, who was like a second mother, Pickering says. Gilliam lived in the Klondyke community but commuted out to Black Mountain for years. “She really became one of the main people in my life I identified with and connected with,” she says. As she got to know Gilliam, she saw the daily struggles of people living in Klondyke and realized the children living there had no access to training in arts and music. Klondyke was one of the first places she brought musicians to, and in January, LEAF started a new jazz program there, bringing in teacher Gary Bradley to show some of Gilliam’s great-grandchildren how to play trumpet and sax.

Starting in 2006, Pickering also pushed her efforts further afield with LEAF International, which sends instruments and encourages musical training for children in places like Rwanda and Guatemala. The program partners with Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots, which works with youth on environmental and humanitarian projects in 120 countries. This summer, LEAF will launch a Haiti outreach program. Working with Asheville filmmaker Kurt Mann, LEAF International will organize local music teachers to work with kids at the New Life Orphanage in Port Au Prince.

To fund all of this outreach work (besides the Haiti program, which will have a separate fundraiser), Pickering and a crew of Asheville creative types are holding an ambitious fundraiser next month. Christine DiBenedetto of the Asheville salon Wink Heads and Threads is partnering with Brooke Priddy of Ship to Shore to put on a fashion show. But don’t look for a regular fashion show. DiBenedetto says Priddy is creating avant-garde headpieces and couture clothing as tributes to each of the countries LEAF works in. DiBenedetto’s staff will do styling, belly dancer Lisa Zahiya will choreograph, and the French Broad Chocolate Lounge will create a signature truffle for the event. The party takes place at Highland Brewing Company in East Asheville and includes a performance by percussionist and composer River Guerguerian. “We’ve always been so impressed with Jennifer and her staff and everything they’re about,” says DiBenedetto. “LEAF is not just a festival. They’re doing some serious grassroots stuff.”

For more information about LEAF, which runs May 12-15, go to theleaf.com. For details or to volunteer for the fundraiser on June 25 at Highland Brewing Company, call Christine DiBenedetto at 828-277-4070. Fundraiser tickets go on sale May 16 at www.theleaf.com.