“One, two. Ready? Go!”
Kellams: It's a Friday afternoon in mid-August. At this hour, the National Weather Service lists the Fayetteville temperature at 102 degrees. The University of Arkansas Razorback Marching Band is on pavement, getting ready for its first football game of the year. There are coolers with water everywhere for hydration breaks and tents to get out of the sun, but the practice time has to get in. It's on a parking lot marked with the same kind of yard-line markers found on a football field.
When this session was recorded, the first game was a few weeks away. When I reached Chase Jones this week, tomorrow's game against North Alabama was just days away. Jones is the associate director of bands at the University of Arkansas. He says, yes, the summer prep requires a lot.
Jones: It does. Our students are working really hard. They have been working really hard since we started at the beginning of August with our rehearsals to get ready for the season. And they invest a lot of time and energy into what we do to add something to the game-day experience for Razorback fans and support the teams that we play for, and kind of be the soundtrack of the game-day experience and bring a lot of those traditions and the pageantry that people look to college athletics for.
So they work very hard, put in a lot of hours, and we're really proud of what they put out on the field every Saturday.
Kellams: And it's not just — as I realized watching this practice — what's on the field for the marching before and at halftime. You're going over the things that you play every time there's a first down. You’ve got to get everything right.
Jones: Yeah. We talk about there being three aspects of our performance on game day — really four — but our pregame and our halftime shows, and then what we do in the stands as well during the game. We talk to the students a lot about how more people will hear them perform in the stands than on the field, just because of the TV reach and the broadcast of the game and picking up the ambient sounds of us playing in the stands is going to go out and be heard by millions of people.
And so we want to make sure that that is another high-quality aspect of our performance and that we're doing the things in that area to support our team and to make all of our alumni and Razorback fans out there proud of what we're doing.
Kellams: At halftime of the game against North Alabama, what will we hear? What will we see?
Jones: So our first halftime show is what we're calling the Razorback Stadium Sing-Along. We're playing some classic karaoke tunes that hopefully we can get our fans engaged and sing along with us, although we know it's going to be really hot, so I wouldn't blame fans if they're taking a break in the shade. But we'll be out there performing, and hopefully there's a great crowd in the stands there at the game on Saturday.
But we just try to do something — each one of our shows over the course of the season, we hope we play at least one show that every fan in the stadium will really identify with and feel like, “Hey, that one was for me.” And so the first one's going to touch on a wide range of music, from “Sweet Caroline” and “Don’t Stop Believin',” some classic sing-along tunes, to some more recent tunes that are hopefully a little bit more geared toward our current students and student body at the game.
Kellams: How many halftime performances or shows do you have ready for a school year?
Jones: So we'll do seven different halftime shows over the course of this season. We'll do a new show at each game. We've learned one. We've started working on two more, our next two halftime shows for the Georgia game and the Tulsa game, coming up at the end of the month. And then that's in addition to our traditional pregame show that we also learn.
Kellams: What does it take for a musician to get that many shows, the muscle memory and all of that? What does it take?
Jones: Well, it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of effort and a lot of energy on the students' part to learn the music, to learn the drill formations on the field that we use. But the great thing about working with our students is they're all extremely talented. All of our students arrive to us with at least four years, typically, of high school marching band experience. So we don't have to teach them how to do marching band. There's some unique things that we do here that they have to learn, but they're used to the process and the procedure of learning a marching band show.
We just kind of shift that into overdrive and move pretty quickly when we're learning, which we have to do with the amount of material and content that we learn over the course of our semester. But when you've got dedicated, hardworking, talented students like we do, that makes that process — I'm not going to say easy — but it makes it achievable.
Kellams: I ask this last question of theater companies and actors: You work all this time, you get it right, and then they strike the set and they go on to the next show. There's something magical about an ephemeral show, but do you ever get nostalgic when you're done with a show you've worked so hard on? And it's like, “OK, turn the page. Next game.”
Jones: Definitely. There are some that stick out as personal favorites, and I know the students have that as well. One good thing about the way we do things here — and many college marching bands do — is we kind of keep that element of it with our pregame show, since that's the same every game. We have that piece, but we've also got the different halftime show that kind of keeps things fresh.
And then, kind of on a bigger picture than that, each year, typically, whatever game we recognize our seniors at, the show for that game is actually selected by our seniors. So they get to vote on music that they want to bring back from their freshman year. And so there's a little bit of that nostalgia that can come back through pulling back some of their favorite tunes from their freshman year to play at our senior show at the end of each year.
Kellams: Chase Jones, speaking of all the time that it takes to get ready, I know you're on your way for a practice. Thank you so much for speaking with us.
Jones: Absolutely. Thank you.
Kellams: Chase Jones is associate director of bands and director of the Razorback Marching Band at the University of Arkansas. The Razorback Marching Band will be in Donald W. Reynolds Razorback Stadium tomorrow for pregame, halftime and postgame performances. This is Ozarks at Large.
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.
