Jake Hertzog - Ozark Concerto (2025)

Following a succession of five acclaimed cutting edge jazz-rock trio outings with bassist Harvie S. and drummer Victor Jones (including 2013's Throwback on ZOHO, featuring special guest trumpeter Randy Brecker) guitarist Jake Hertzog decided to scale back. That radical change in musical direction resulted in 2016's intimate solo electric guitar album, Well Lit Shadow, followed by 2018's acoustic duet project with Yishai Fisher, Stringscapes, and 2023's ambisonic duet with Adam Hogan, A Turn of Events.

After receiving a generous grant, Hertzog opted to dream big. Drawing on his classical and jazz studies, he created a large-scale work for jazz orchestra, guitar, and string quartet along the lines of revered guitar concertos of the past, from Kenny Burrell's Guitar Forms with the Gil Evans Orchestra (1965) to John McLaughlin's The Mediterranean concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra (1988) and more recently Bill Frisell's Orchestras with the 60-piece Brussels Philharmonic (2024).

Hertzog's Ozark Concerto, which had its world premiere in 2024 at the UARK Jazz Festival on the Fayetteville campus of the University of Arkansas and was subsequently recorded for this ZOHO release, is coming directly out of that tradition.

A grandiose concerto for electric guitar and the 23-piece Ozark Jazz Philharmonic conducted by Susumu Watanabe (who also contributed arrangements), Hertzog's latest ambitious undertaking finds his considerable chops and creativity spilling over to a much larger canvas than he's ever worked on before.

"I wanted to create something that from start to finish followed more of an orchestral or classical philosophy of what a feature for an instrument could be," he said.

Divided into seven parts, the Ozark Concerto showcases Hertzog playing electric guitar in the company of full orchestra ("Part I," "Part III", "Part V" and "Part VII"), brass instruments ("Part II"), string quartet ("Part IV") and saxophones ("Part VI").