Jazz festival honors legend

Brent Wallarab was still in high school when he first heard a live jazz performance. He had been playing in the school's band, but jazz wasn't something the orchestra performed. His life-long love affair with jazz began with just one beat of that mesmerizing melody.\nIt is this love that brings Wallarab and fellow jazz musicians of the Buselli-Wallarab Jazz Orchestra to the Buskirk-Chumley Theater tonight. As part of the Second Annual Hoagy Carmichael Festival, the BWJO will perform a suite in three movements which Wallarab composed specifically for the event.\nThe festival was created in 2002 to honor Bloomington's legendary son. \nThis year, the festival expands to focus on music made at Gennett Recording Studios in Richmond, Ind., where many Indiana jazz musicians got their start, including Carmichael. \n"If you have an annual festival devoted to just one person, you're going to run out of material pretty soon," Wallarab, who plays lead trombone in the orchestra, said. "Hoagy and Gennett have a very strong connection."\nThe BWJO seeks to explore this connection in its performances. Wallarab's new composition uses the music of Carmichael, Louis Armstrong, Bix Biederbeck and Jelly Roll Morton, drawing upon the themes of their early recordings at Gennett, which was the premier jazz recording studio in the first quarter of the 20th century.\nThe BWJO is a 17-piece Indianapolis-based non-profit jazz ensemble that regularly performs at the Jazz Kitchen. Today, the orchestra is in its third official performance season, said Ben Foley, the orchestra's board president. \n"As an ensemble, our vision of jazz is high art that's very approachable, but with a sense of elegance," said Mark Buselli, BWJO's co-director, who also received a master's degree in jazz studies from IU.\nBWJO was formed in 1994 in Bloomington, and the orchestra moved to Indianapolis after its founders graduated from IU. But Bloomington remains a vital part in its development -- several of BWJO's musicians are students and professors at IU. \nThe orchestra's philosophy centers on fusing traditional with the contemporary and finding new interpretations of classics.\n"Change is the key word for life today," Buselli, who plays lead trumpet, said. "I think people who improvise and learn how to improvise have a greater time in life because they know how to change and how to adapt to those changes."\nIn this way, they follow Carmichael's lead, who believed in creating new arrangements and never repeating himself in his compositions. In fact, his spirit led the orchestra to release a CD of Hoagy Carmichael's music, "Heart & Soul," in January, according to BWJO's Web site.\n"One of the orchestra's missions is to continue the long tradition of innovative creative jazz that has always come out of Indiana," Wallarab said. "We're taking classical Indiana jazz and giving it a new life through contemporary interpretation."\nHe said he believes Bloomington, more so than any other place in Indiana, has been a hotbed of forward-thinking musicianship throughout the 20th century. Indiana itself has been home to jazz greats including Pookie Johnson, Al Cobine, Wes Montgomery, Jimmy Coe and Mary Moss. \n"It's great that Bloomington embraces contemporary interpretations, instead of dwelling on old-time classics," he said. \nThis determination to infuse old-time music with a touch of contemporary jazz has led the orchestra to create an educational partnership with the Indianapolis Public School System. The orchestra had already established itself as an educational entity after leading workshops and teaching summer camp, but this program comes on the heels of a national effort to revive music education in America's schools. \n"If you want to hear the old-time arrangement, just stay home and listen to the records," he said. "When I see students at live music events, they're excited. They're buzzing like bees because they've seen and heard something exciting, something they can't get on TV."\n-- Contact arts editor Jane Charney at echarney@indiana.edu.