What is Jazz, Really?

Standing next to my son, Trey, in the middle of Millennium Park, soft grass worn under thousands of feet. Around us, the Chicago skyline rises out of the trees, all glass and steel catching the evening’s last light. A cool breeze off Lake Michigan cuts through the late summer heat.

In front of us, the Jay Pritzker Pavilion opens up like something half building, half spaceship. Frank Gehry designed it to look like ribbons of brushed steel peeling back off the stage, curling up into the sky in every direction. A trellis of speakers stretches out over the whole great lawn in a grid overhead, so the sound doesn't stay trapped up front near the stage. It follows you back across the field, clear and balanced no matter how far back you've laid out your blanket. You could close your eyes fifty yards from the stage and still hear every brush stroke on the snare.

Thousands of people are spread out across the lawn. Blankets and lawn chairs, families and college kids. Old couples who've clearly been coming for decades, all of them here for the same reason. Nobody paid a cover charge. The Chicago Jazz Festival is free. It's always been free. Founded in 1979 as a public gift to music lovers. For over 40 years, they’ve shown up for jazz.

The Bruce Henry Quintet launches into Earth, Wind & Fire's "Mighty Mighty.”

I recognized the song immediately. Earth, Wind & Fire is a powerhouse funk and R&B group, not a jazz band, but this wasn't their record. This was five musicians taking that tune apart in real time. The quintet didn't just play the record's tight, fixed groove. The rhythm section constantly altered the time feel, reacting to the soloists' re-harmonizing of the chord extensions and phrasing on the fly. It was spontaneous, conversational, and risk-taking. They transformed an already exciting funk R&B tune into an act of real-time composition, and I never once doubted I was listening to high-level jazz.

This is nothing new. Throughout its history, jazz has functioned like a sponge, constantly absorbing and reinterpreting the popular music of the day rather than sitting in isolation. Pioneer brass bands transformed military marches, ragtime, and folk blues into an entirely new sound. During the 1930s and 1940s, popular Broadway show tunes and radio hits became the primary playground for swing bands and bebop innovators. Artists like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie took those simple melody lines and radically reworked them with fresh harmonies and wild improvisation.

That habit of soaking up the surrounding culture only grew stronger as popular music evolved. Mid-century musicians embraced bossa nova and Afro-Cuban rhythms. Miles Davis famously fused jazz with psychedelic rock in the late 1960s, and modern innovators like Robert Glasper regularly blend R&B and hip-hop into their arrangements. Jazz musicians treat the popular tunes of any era as a shared language to experiment, innovate, and connect with listeners.

As a jazz educator and working saxophonist in Central Arkansas, there is a question that has haunted me for years. What is jazz, really? It’s heavy on my mind every time I see a flyer advertising "Jazz Night" at a local restaurant or upscale cocktail lounge, only to walk in and hear a group playing locked-in R&B, funk, or rock instrumentals.

Venues love to use the word. To many venue managers, jazz is not a musical tradition. It's marketing shorthand for a classy, dimly lit ambiance where they can charge fifteen dollars for a premixed Old Fashioned. But on the bandstand, blurring these lines creates a real disconnect.

A buddy of mine recently reminded me this is hardly new around here. Back in the late 1950s, tenor saxophone giant Pharoah Sanders was coming up right here in Little Rock. In later interviews, Sanders said the local gig scene back then was dominated by commercial R&B, blues, and strict venue demands that boxed musicians in. To actually play jazz and stretch the boundaries of the art form, he had to leave the state. The regional habit of calling every instrumental commercial groove "jazz" has been alive and well for decades.

I think about that every time I'm back in Chicago.

My wife and I started going to the Chicago Jazz Festival back when we were still in college. I remember how surreal it was, being in a big city that supported and encouraged it. This year, we took our kids to experience the festival, and it did not disappoint. Yet again, I found myself surrounded by thousands of people all there in support and enjoying one of my favorite art forms. Standing in that field with Trey, hearing "Mighty Mighty" turn into something else entirely in real time, was the clearest version of that feeling I've had in years.

Don't get me wrong, because I love a heavy groove. I play bar gigs, country clubs, and wedding receptions with cover bands all over the region. When I am playing with a funk group or commercial wedding band, we respect the job. We play a convincing, authentic swing set during the cocktail hour if it’s requested, pulling out real swing feel, conversational dynamics, and jazz vocabulary. When the dance set starts, we switch hats entirely. We drop into a locked pocket, hit the heavy backbeats, and play Earth, Wind & Fire or Bruno Mars or whatever popular music is called for. We play those styles with precision and grit, but we don’t call the dance set “jazz” just because I am holding a horn on stage.

The disconnect I see comes down to a truth my mentors and respected jazz teachers drilled into me years ago. Song choice doesn't dictate the genre. The players do.

A rock band can pick up a Real Book, play the head to "Autumn Leaves," and read the chord charts perfectly off the page, but without swing feel, dynamic interplay, or jazz phrasing, it will still sound like a rock band. Conversely, when true jazz musicians take a song from outside the genre, the entire architecture shifts. That's exactly what I heard happen to "Mighty Mighty" in that field.

This distinction hits even closer to home standing next to Trey, watching him navigate his own way into the local music scene on bass, playing alongside me in my jazz combos and attending local jams. Today's younger rhythm section players are often insanely virtuosic, raised on modern gospel chops, neo-soul, and tight sixteenth-note funk pockets. But playing a heavy, repetitive thumb-groove over a static two-chord vamp is fundamentally different from playing jazz bass. Jazz requires a fluid pulse, micro-dynamics, harmonic leading tones, and the ability to steer the harmony while conversing across the bandstand in real time. Heavy emphasis on "conversing."

I don't say any of this to throw shade on local musicians. The region is full of incredible talent. Rather, the dilution of the genre comes in part from a combination of surface-level venue marketing and a genuine gap in education regarding the history, culture, and language of the genre.

Jazz is an oral tradition and a discipline, not just an aesthetic vibe or a playlist. Great music deserves to be called by its real name. We don't need to stretch the definition of jazz to validate a killer funk or R&B band, because funk and R&B are already brilliant on their own. By honoring the specific language and culture of each genre, we do right by the audience, the players, and the music itself.

Standing there under the beautiful Chicago skyline, listening to incredibly balanced and clear sound, surrounded by thousands of people who never once doubted what they were hearing, I wanted that for my city. Not just the crowd. The clarity.

- Dave Williams II

Read more from Dave here: www.davewilliamsii.com

Before You Learn to Solo, You Learn to Listen

One of my favorite things about playing music on Friday nights at Moody Brews is watching parents follow their kids around, hoping to keep them out of trouble but giving them just enough freedom to explore and be curious without causing a scene. I specifically remember that part of my own life with both of my kids.

I was once told that if I ever wanted to know if my music was any good, I should watch how the children react to it. They have no filter. I see this everywhere now. Many adults are hyperaware of how they react to something, often controlling it based on how they think they should react. Kids don't have that "learned" skill yet. They either feel it or they don't.

When a child approaches the bandstand out of curiosity, I'll often see a parent pull them back, worried their kid might disrupt what's happening. I like to meet them halfway and finish the connection the kid already started. I keep some light plastic shakers close by, ones that aren't too loud or too heavy, for a young, curious mind.

The other night, I watched several little ones making their way around the square as we started playing our first set at Moody Brews, never really settling in to one place long enough for their parents to disengage. One young boy zigzagged the perimeter of the courtyard with his toy excavator in hand, looking for the right place to dig, and made his way directly in front of the drum set. I could tell he was interested in the sound because the toy hit the ground and immediately ceased to exist in his mind.

His dad started pointing out the different instruments to him, whispering their names in his ear. I saw my opportunity and grabbed a shaker to offer him. The smile of realization that crossed his dad's face as I walked over hit home. I could hear him say, "Harper, look!" The little guy cautiously accepted the sand shaker from me and shook it a couple of times. That's all it took. He instinctively began bouncing his entire body to the beat, waving the shaker around. He was now a part of the band, creating music with us.

Once the soloists finished and we played the last part of the tune, I grabbed the microphone and introduced the band while the audience was still clapping. "Chris Parker playing the piano, Ian on bass, Addison on drums." I then added without pausing, "And for the first time, y'all heard Harper on the shaker!" The crowd went wild. The smile that appeared on Harper's face when he heard his name and realized that everyone was cheering for him was incredible.

That's part of what a jam teaches you. Before you learn to solo, you learn to listen. You can't sit in with a band you're not hearing. Harper knew that before he could tie his shoes. He just felt the beat and moved with it. Most of what I try to pass on to musicians is some version of that same lesson. They just forgot they used to know it.

This is a large part of why I do what I do.

For anyone who hasn't been, a jam isn't the same as a concert. Nobody's rehearsed anything necessarily. A band starts a tune, and other musicians who showed up hoping to play get waved up to sit in, either one at a time or a few at once. You call a tune, count it off, and find out together what happens. It's all about listening.

This gig didn't start as a jam session.

On May 19, 2025, at 3:12 in the afternoon, I got a text from a number I didn't recognize. "Hey Dave, this is Josiah Moody. We are looking at 5-7 for jazz. We could move that forward or back a little bit. Let me know how that works for y'all."

We landed on 6-8 that Friday. Just a duo. Chris Parker on keys, me on sax.

A week later, another text. "Hey man...feel like running it back this Friday in the Square? So far, the weather is looking beautiful."

That was it. We were in.

By June, we'd added an hour to leave space for a friend to sit in with us at the end of the night. Nobody called it anything yet. It was just Friday, but you could feel something starting to shift. Word started to spread. Former students started finding their way out.

We didn't set out to start a jam session. It built itself, one Friday at a time, out of a text message and then another one, out of people who wanted somewhere to listen and somewhere to sit in. That part isn't new to Little Rock. It's old. It goes back further than Moody Brews, further than Pettaway Square, back to rooms that don't exist anymore. This city has always had music like this happening somewhere, mostly undersung, mostly word of mouth. Moody Brews happens to be one place where it's living right now.

Chris and I still start every Friday close to how we started that first one. Two friends, a keyboard, a saxophone, and no plan beyond playing what feels right. Everything that happens after that, who sits in, who shows up early, who brings a kid who grows up into the music instead of just watching it, is up to the night. That's what the jam at Moody Brews has become.

Every week, we check the weather and make a game-day decision. If it’s too hot, we might push the start time back an hour to wait for the sun to go down. If it’s looking like rain, we might reschedule. Let’s be honest, Arkansas weather is unpredictable at best. So, we always say, “Every Friday that the weather is nice, we’ll be there.”

— Dave Williams II

Welcome to The Wire

If you’ve found your way here, welcome!

The Wire is the editorial heartbeat of LR Jazz Underground. I started this platform with a simple, massive goal: to document the pulse, amplify the voices, and unite the scene of Little Rock jazz.

After graduating college and beginning a career in music education, I started checking out the Little Rock jazz scene. I was met with some amazing venues and incredibly talented people scattered all over the city playing jazz, but very few people seemed to know about it. I found it to be extraordinarily difficult to keep up with the who, what, when, and where of the various happenings.

As I kept exploring, I noticed how much word of mouth advertising was running the show. Let’s face it; it’s a little old school. There are a ton of young, emerging players and veterans in our scene, but typically, they don’t know who the others are or how to find them. You don’t know what you don’t know!

While searching around for places to play and people to listen to, I discovered how out of the loop I actually was and how incredible these local musicians are. I thought to myself, “Man… I need to practice..!” HA!

But truthfully, I thought about how the majority of these cats, past and present, do this on the low and completely undocumented, just out of a genuine, pure, love for the music. We live in the age of technology, where virtually everything is done online, and yet we are relying on word of mouth?!

I began thinking of ways to bridge this gap and thought, “Why not create a platform dedicated to helping people find these gigs, connecting players with music lovers, and helping unite the scene.”

Initially, I dreamt too big — trying to cover Arkansas as a whole — but I quickly realized how massive of an undertaking that would be. After some reflection and digging through the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, I realized how much soul, pride, and history is right here in Little Rock alone.

A light bulb switched on in my brain. I’m from here. I love this city, I love the people in it, and have found an immense attachment to the underground artists that have cultivated this city’s heartbeat for decades.

Little Rock is the answer.

I am no writer, and still a work in progress in my musical and personal journey, but beginning this has been absolutely invigorating.

Thank you for being here, and I hope you’ll join me on this journey.

— Joshua South, Founder, LR Jazz Underground