CONWAY: Hot Club Arkansas debuts in Conway

RIVER VALLEY and OZARK AREA — For years, Bill Nesbitt has been trying to find out just what Arkansas music really is.

“It’s not pure bluegrass or country,” he said. “It’s sort of a blend of different things.”

“And now for something completely different.”

Nesbitt began Hot Club Arkansas’ first show with those words, because Nesbitt’s new band is not playing bluegrass, country or any mix of the two.

Hot Club Arkansas is an acoustic swing band drawing inspiration from the guitar stylings of Gypsy guitar

ist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stephane

Grappelli.

But the mandolin, played by 16-year-old

Harry Clark of Floyd, makes the band dif

ferent from what most consider pure Gypsy

jazz.

“The fact that we have the mandolin as

a second instrument kind of sets us apart,

and the fact that our arrangements are not

what you would call typical Hot Club,” Nes

bitt said.

Nesbitt plays guitar, along with his former

student Bob Baldridge of Little Rock, while

Harry Clark’s brother Jed has taken on the

upright bass.

“I consider them peers - music peers because they are just fantastic,” Nesbitt said. “There’s this whole generation of teenage whiz-kid bluegrass players that are coming up in Arkansas right now. Harry and Jed are part of that kind of movement.”

Jed Clark said he had never played bass in a band before joining Hot Club Arkansas, but was delighted when Nesbitt asked him to give it a try.

“I thought, ‘This is a great way to get some practical performing experience with bass,’” Jed said. “That is what really got me into the Gypsy jazz.”

A guitar student at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Baldridge is currently the only member of the band studying music academically. Jed, who will graduate from high school this spring, hopes to do so as well.

“I just got accepted to the Belmont School of Music over in Nashville,” he said. “That is a possibility, but my degree is looking at costing about $100,000,and I don’t think that is going to happen.”

For now, the Clark brothers and Baldridge are happy to play alongside Nesbitt.

“Bill Nesbitt has been around the block,” Jed said. “I’m just a kid, and not to say that he’s an old man or anything, but he’s been a good musician for 30 years.”

The band rehearses several times a week in serious sessions during which they often play music for several hours into the night.

The Faulkner County Library hosted the band’s first performance on March 4, when more than 100 people gathered to hear Hot Club Arkansas’ unique sound.

The band members plan to keep performing together as long as possible. This also means more long practices for Jed as he attempts to master the upright bass.

“Those bass strings are big,” he said. “My hands are small, and they hurt after a while.”

But he does his best not to complain.

“I’m very blessed,” Jed said.

River Valley Ozark, Pages 155 on 03/21/2010

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