Jake Hertzog: The Ozark Concerto

As Terry Teachout very accurately wrote, "The relationship between jazz and classical music has often been close...but is ultimately equivocal" ("Jazz and Classical Music: To the Third Stream and Beyond," in Bill Kirchner, editor, The Oxford Companion to Jazz, Oxford University Press, 2000). Equivocal is a tough word. It can mean suspicious, doubtful or uncertain. Spend any time around musicians in either camp and you find out about suspicions, doubts and uncertainties. They range from 'overpaid' to 'tissue paper lip' to 'wouldn't swing if you hung him.'

Today, the situation is better than it was say a century ago, when someone was more or less compelled to choose one or the other. Think of Philadelphia clarinetist Billy Krechmer or trumpet player Joe Wilder. Sometimes the choice was a real choice—even if enforced by an irritated administrator at Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, or by the ugly racial barriers that kept Black musicians well out of the market for symphony musicians. Yet it was a reality, even if the musicians themselves, especially the better ones, knew about the corpus in which the other was formed. Some are still old enough to remember a jazz student who avoided a prestigious university program, not for want of talent, but for want of desire to play classics. or even conservatory students whose perspective was reversed. It happened. It still does.

Another part of the problem is what, for want of a better phrase, might be termed the values of the academy. One thinks in particular of the Academie de Musique in France, whose 19th-century standards and rules controlled entree into the salons, the exhibitions that could make or break an artist's career. While the giants of modern art ultimately finished off the reign of the Academie, some residual of its expectations as to technique, subject matter or a hierarchy of values never quite went away. Some jazz musicians—Phil Woods is an example—thought formal university programs destroyed individuality. If jazz means, as Wayne Shorter put it, "no category," then the source of the conflict would seem clear. University jazz programs transformed the level of musicianship of the average jazz player, especially the top programs. Players can execute in ways that were inconceivable a scant 40 years ago. But, as you sometimes hear, one big lab band sounds like another, or worse, they all sound the same no matter what state they reside in. Like it or not, the perception persists, and, alas, some of the reality too. Some recall the days when instructors referred to students as "products." Hardly a clarion call to individuality that improvisational jazz demands.

This brings the listener to Jake Hertzog and Ozark Concerto. Dr. Hertzog, a guitarist who has played with Harvie S and Victor Jones, is a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, Berklee and The University of Arkansas, where he serves as an assistant professor of music. By his own account, Hertzog conceived of the concerto project as a student at Manhattan in a class with Jim McNeely, which combined jazz and large orchestra arrangement. It took time, grant money (Jazz Road Creative Residency program from South Arts, and a project of Ozark folk music funded through an Artist 360 Grant from Mid-America Arts Alliance) and a raft of more conventional recordings, but Ozark Concerto is the result. The work is in seven parts, and opens focused on Hertzog's instrument, the guitar. It then brings horns into the mix and what is described as a "contrapuntal swirl of strings and woodwinds" melting into a string quartet and then piano, closing out with a suitably muscular conclusion, a calm ending nevertheless. It is, to put it mildly, an impressive piece of work. If a listener asks what is this about, well, it is not Shostakovich or Beethoven, but then again, it is 2025 without horses or tanks charging through the Ozarks, not 1815 or 1943. There is no program other than a sonic reflection on experience. The sounds, structure, texture, and overall impression are what is at issue. And, en bloc, the impact is very strong indeed.

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