Kellams: This weekend, there will be two chances to hear Jake Hertzog, Fayetteville resident and assistant professor at the University of Arkansas, with his musical collaborator Juampy Juárez.
They’ve played together in Argentina and in the U.S. and have recorded a record together. Hertzog says this musical partnership began through a distant mutual admiration for each other’s music.
Hertzog: Well, this goes back to one of the really wonderful things about the jazz and guitar community online. When I was living in New York in probably 2014 or 2015 or so, we connected online. I had just put out a record, I think he had just put out a record, and it was sort of just a mutual admiration — “Wow, what a great guitar player.” And we started up the usual chat.
One of the things that Juampy has been very successful at doing is bringing musicians from all over the world to Argentina to play with him in duo, trio, quartet — various formats. And so he’s been able to not only share his music with different musicians from all over, but also bring a lot of musicians, I think, to Argentina, oftentimes for their first time.
So after a few years of talking about it, he invited me to come and play some shows with him in Argentina. I think that would have been at the end of 2015 or somewhere in there. So we played some duo shows, and we connected with a great rhythm section down there and played some quartet shows — two guitars, bass, drums.
Kellams: Was the first time you actually met face to face when you got to Argentina before the show?
Hertzog: Yeah. So we played a week and a half or so of concerts there, and then I came back to New York, finished grad school, and ended up taking the position here at Arkansas.
First off, one of the first people on my list for a guest artist was, “Oh, let’s bring Juampy in,” because he does some really unique and fascinating things with the guitar. So we were able to bring him here in 2018. We did a few shows and some teaching.
Then last year, after a COVID delay, I got another chance to go down and play with him in Argentina. We played duo, trio, quartet — all over the place — which was really fabulous. And we recorded some music together.
So now this will be his second trip to Arkansas, and we’re going to play a duo show together on the 18th and a quartet show on the 20th.
Kellams: So tell me about the duo. It’s you and another guitar — just you and another guitarist. What can you explore with just two guitars?
Hertzog: One of the most fun parts about playing duo with another guitar player is that we have a very shared common language of things that are jazz and things that are beyond jazz in the guitar universe — whether that’s pedals and effects or techniques and styles borrowed from other genres like rock and blues and so on.
So what that ultimately creates is a whole lot of freedom. You can really play in a way where you don’t know what the other person’s going to do, but you know the same bag of tricks. We can kind of float in different spaces, stretch the form, stretch the chords, stretch the melody.
Juampy and I have played some original music together, which we’ll do in both concerts. But one of the really fun things we like to do together is play standards or cover songs, because we’re building off of a shared vocabulary. He can do something that is based on his experience but also a lot of other music we know together.
I think the main word is freedom — and that’s what makes it so exciting.
Kellams: Jake Hertzog and Juampy Juárez perform tomorrow night at Hubbard Clothing Company in downtown Fayetteville beginning at 9 p.m., and then they’ll perform as part of a jazz quartet Monday night at 7:30 p.m. at the Faulkner Performing Arts Center on the University of Arkansas campus.
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