By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
The H2O church will reverberate with the sounds of a cross-generational collaboration between jazz guitarist and composer Zakk Jones and his great-grandfather, whom he never met.
Jones, who will receive his Master’s in Music in Jazz Performance later this month , has assembled an ensemble of 26 musicians and a speaker, poet Sam Fain, to present “The Whispering Gallery,” a suite of music inspired by his great-grandfather’s poetry.
The concert will be Wednesday, April 13, at 6 p.m. in H2O Church, 252 S. Main St. in downtown Bowling Green.
His great-grandfather Alphonse Boone was African-American and Cuban, who came from Tennessee and later settled in California. He had a distinguished career in the Navy. He was at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked, Jones said, and helped rescue survivors. He later worked as a lab assistant at the University of California Davis.
.And he wrote poetry under the pen name Rex Sebastian.
Jones was always aware of his great-grandfather’s poetry “but it didn’t mean anything to me until I got older.” His grandmother, Boone’s daughter, who was also a poet, really introduced him to the verse.
“Wow, this is heavy stuff,” Jones recalls. “He talks about the Vietnam war. He was a Black American, so he lived through terrible, terrible times and lived through oppression. He wrote about his experience as a Black man in America and as an anti-war protestor during the Vietnam War, but also about the beauty of the world and nature and human relationships.”
So much of what he wrote about, resonated with his great-grandson.
“I really connected with it,” Jones said. “It spoke so much to me. … I feel like I had a kindred spirit in terms of our aesthetic. Even though we never met, I felt that somehow we’ve connected with each other.”
From his first encounter with the poetry, he said, “I was hearing melodies, hearing rhythms, just being inspired.” He’d never collaborated with visual artists or writers before. “So, to read it and immediately have things come to my head meant a lot to me.”
This called to mind the concept of a whispering gallery, a circular room where something whispered can be heard in distant part of the space. “My idea is that he might be whispering his poems back in time, and I received the poems.”
Jones started composing parts of “The Whispering Gallery” in January 2020 when he had an arts residency in Seaside, Florida. He intended to perform some of it that spring. The onset of pandemic prevented that.
Also, Jones, who lives in Columbus, decided to bolster his academic credentials by going to BGSU for graduate work. BGSU, he said, is one of the few places in the state that offer an MM in Jazz Studies.
That’s when he decided to work further on “The Whispering Gallery,” and present it as his masters recital. That’s what he likes about the jazz program at BGSU, where he studies with Ariel Kasler. He could suggest staging such a large concert, and it would be accepted without hesitation.
“This is definitely culmination of my time here and a culmination of myself as a composer.”
The entire 27-member ensemble will perform the first piece, “The Dust Speaks,” the title work in a volume of Rex Sebastian poetry that’s still available through antiquarian book sellers.
The rest of the music is performed by subsets of the entire ensemble – a string quartet, a jazz big band, a septet with strings featuring the electric violin of improvisations of Chase Potter.
The music draws on a variety of styles – gospel, contemporary classical music, avant-garde sounds, and jazz. “Everything you hear is everything I love,” he said “I’m not trying to put on any front. This is just where we are.”
When he was 6, Jones started playing the piano. “Then my dad turned me on to Metallica and AC/DC and my path through guitar was very much through rock and metal.”
He started on the instrument at 11 and “got hooked.”
He knew he wanted to get a music degree, and that meant a choice between classical or jazz guitar. He choose jazz. He had some exposure to the music. His father also loved Miles Davis and Charles Mingus. “So I was hip to that stuff,” he said. “But I never played jazz with anyone until I got to college.”
He moved from Portland, Oregon, to Columbus to attend Capital University where he was placed in five ensembles as soon as he arrived on campus. “I just knew immediately that was the space I wanted to be in.”
For the past 10 years, the 28-year-old has worked as a professional guitarist in a number of genres, including reggae, rock, Brazilian music, and jazz. His main project is a trio that stretches from jazz standards to David Bowie with some Hank Williams worked into the mix.
“Sometimes I don’t even call myself a jazz guitarist,” Jones said. “I just like living in the moment in any musical scenario. So as long as I’m improvising and have that flexibility, I’m happy.”
