What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
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and enhance and bring this cultural experience to Northwest Arkansas," Block continues about the partnership, noting the importance of specifically introducing young people to the history of one of the "only truly American art forms." "Kids love hip hop music, they love popular music; well, all of that stuff wouldn't be here if we didn't have jazz as an art form," he poses. "Before there was a Beyonce and Jay Z, you had a Miles and an Ella. It was the popular music, and people would come from all over just to hear Ella sing or hear Miles play. "And that appreciation is not going to grow unless there's more events like the Fayetteville Jazz Festival that draw in students, and get them to say, 'Hey, this is a neat art form, let me learn more about this.'" Bringing live music back outside reintroduces more opportunities to invite the general public into the festival atmosphere. Prairie Street Live provides the perfect space for outdoor gathering and will host free performances each of the three nights of the festival. While the workshops will be for students, the rest of the performances and panels hosted at the Fayetteville Public Library will be live streamed as well as accessible after the festival. "Making a lot of the material accessible to, hopefully, a wide variety of audiences locally, nationally and internationally, that was real big win. [So we're] keeping some of that virtual component," Teal says. "But there's just something that you can't replicate in having live performances, live workshops. So with an eye on what was going to be safe and possible, that was something that we really wanted to prioritize bringing back to some degree this year." "For all students, whether they come from musical or non-musical backgrounds, urban or suburban areas, public or arts schools, it's important to experience the music live and in-person," Tarantino concurs. "That energy is something you can't replicate in an app or on Zoom." www.downtownrogersinc.org 6 WHAT'S UP! APRIL 18-24, 2021 Jazz Continued From Page 5 FAYETTEVILLE Vocalist Carmen Bruner and organist Jeremy Thomas (below) are also artists-in-residence for the festival. (Courtesy Photo) For saxophonist Alexa Tarantino, it was the spirit of jazz that brought her to the genre. "The spontaneity, creativity, rhythm and self-expression were what drew me as a young student. And it's what draws me to it now! Now, I'm particularly interested in composition and the development of creative projects that can blur genres and build on social and personal themes." Tarantino is another of the artists- in-residence for this year's festival. Her new album "firefly" was just released April 16, and Fayetteville festivalgoers will be among the first audiences to have access to physical copies of the album. (Courtesy Photo) Block