This is the Alan Broadbent Trio performing the standard "Struttin' with Some Barbecue" from the trio's album Trio in Motion. Two-thirds of the trio, pianist Broadbent and bassist Harvie S, are artists in residence this week at the University of Arkansas as part of the fifth annual UArk Jazz Festival, April 15 through 19.
Jake Hertzog, guitarist, composer and assistant professor of music at the university, joined us in the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio last week to talk about the festival.
Kyle Kellams: This year's edition of the festival benefits from continued cooperation from on and off campus.
Jake Hertzog: We've been able to collaborate much more deeply with the Northwest Arkansas Jazz Society in the planning of the festival, the kinds of activities that our guest artists are engaged in and the reach — most importantly — of the festival and the guest artists throughout the music and jazz community locally. It's four days of music, and our artists will be here for six days doing teaching and workshops, and they'll work with university students, the general public, members of the Northwest Arkansas Jazz All-Stars, which is an exciting part of our collaboration as well.
Kellams: The Northwest Arkansas Jazz All-Stars — those are high schoolers.
Hertzog: Yes, they're high schoolers. The best of the best. And they make up this big band. They're phenomenally talented. Robert Ginsburg and Rick Salomon and many others in the jazz society have done an amazing job putting that group together.
Kellams: A lot of people are excited that a bassist is an artist in residence this year.
Hertzog: We've tried to rotate various instrumentalists and various folks who have specialties in different genres. And this has been a pretty incredible year for jazz, actually, for us. Just in this semester, we had an amazing guitarist come in and coach, and we had an incredible show featuring Claudia Burson with Jihye Lee as part of our SHE Festival. And now we have Harvie S and Alan Broadbent. One of the amazing things about having a bass player is bass players are often the heart of every band, and they've played with so many people in so many idioms. A master artist like Harvie — it's almost difficult to name somebody he hasn't played or recorded with. He's one of the most recorded bass players of his generation, or any generation. He's recorded and performed through jazz and fusion and straight ahead and bebop and Latin music and world music. I think that's a really fun perspective for our students to get to hear about.
Kellams: And Alan Broadbent?
Hertzog: Alan is an extraordinary pianist. He's been a part of many Grammy-winning projects, and he's also an orchestrator, conductor and arranger, and genuinely embodies what a jazz artist does. Again, another person who's worked with just everybody under the sun in the jazz idiom. And one of the things that makes these folks special is they have worked together as a duo for many years, and they've done other projects with large and small ensembles together as well. So bringing them as a duo was just too good of an opportunity to pass up, because we get to experience their artistry together and then their individual talents as they apply to our students, our faculty and our community.
Kellams: They'll be working with students. There's a public workshop — are they involved in that at all?
Hertzog: Absolutely. All of our events are free and open to the public. Most of them are taking place on campus. There will be a really exciting public jazz workshop opportunity on Friday from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. in the choir room — Room 335 — of the Billingsley Music Building. The Latin American Ensemble will perform. One of my favorite things about the artist-in-residency experiences we've been able to have for the last few years is that we've been able to bring in artists that can play with all sorts of different ensembles and have experience in all sorts of different genres. When folks come to see Alan and Harvie during this year's festival, you'll see them play with our Latin American ensemble, our big band, our faculty, our World Music Ensemble. You'll see them play duo. You'll see them play with various configurations of our faculty. We're definitely going to have a huge variety. If you come for one of the nights, come back for the second night — you'll hear something completely different.
Kellams: What's the decision-making process for the tunes that'll be played? Is that student-led? Faculty-led? Artist-led?
Hertzog: All of the above, actually. One of the things that works really great when we have such spectacularly talented guests is to try to set up something that the students all sound great on, because we know the guests are going to sound great. I was just chatting with them before I came over here about song lists. We'll have a whole faculty chat with them on Tuesday night on what to pull from what the students know and what the directors have been rehearsing.
Kellams: Do you need to pre-register?
Hertzog: Yes. Folks can get a ticket online, but if you show up, you can also get a ticket at the door. All of these events are free. We have shows Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and all day Saturday, but also Saturday night. A full schedule is available at music.uark.edu.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
