Hogtown Hot Club Performs Parisian Swing Jazz at the Pryor Center

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Hogtown Hot Club, featuring Jim Greeson (guitar), Ed Nicholson (guitar), Jim Jernigan (clarinet), and Garrett Jones (not pictured) sitting in for Mike Johnson (bass)

Join in for a lively performance by Hogtown Hot Club from 7 to 9 p.m. on Thursday, July 18, at the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.

The Pryor Center is located at 1 East Center Street, Suite 120, and parking is available on the Fayetteville Square. The event is free and open to the public.

Hogtown Hot Club was brought together in 2010 by the members' love of swing music from the '30s and '40s. Hogtown was inspired by legendary Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt and his group the "Hot Club de France" whose interpretations of the American jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong morphed into what is now called "Gypsy Jazz." 

The group consists of four musicians who have been part of Northwest Arkansas' music scene collectively for over 40 years while playing with numerous ensembles of different styles. 

Prior to his recent retirement, Ed Nicholson was the senior director of community relations at Tyson Foods and was responsible for leading the company's corporate social responsibility efforts, including focus areas of hunger and disaster relief. In his earlier years, Nicholson toured with various country rock musicians and is still one of the hardest working musicians in our area. 

Jim Jernigan worked as a corporate pilot for years and still builds and flies his own planes. Jernigan is also a gifted clarinetist who has performed jazz for years and has also acted in a number of productions in Northwest Arkansas. 

Jim Greeson was a professor of music at the U of A for 37 years where he taught guitar and music composition and led the UA jazz ensemble. In 2012 Greeson was inducted into the Arkansas Jazz Hall of Fame. 

Bassist Garrett Jones is a graduate of the U of A music department and is a remarkably versatile bassist who has traveled around the country performing with The Vine Brothers and the Blues Brothers touring ensemble. 

Collectively Hogtown Hot Club evokes the vigor of Bourbon Street jazz together with the romanticism of Paris cafes and the sounds of Jazz Manouche! 

About the The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History: The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History is an oral history program with the mission to document the history of Arkansas through the collection of spoken memories and visual records, preserve the collection in perpetuity, and connect Arkansans and the world to the collection through the Internet, TV broadcasts, educational programs, and other means. The Pryor Center records audio and video interviews about Arkansas history and culture, collects other organizations' recordings, organizes these recordings into an archive, and provides public access to the archive, primarily through the website at http://pryorcenter.uark.edu. The Pryor Center is the state's only oral and visual history program with a statewide, seventy-five county mission to collect, preserve, and share audio and moving image recordings of Arkansas history.

About the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences: The J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences is the largest and most academically diverse unit on campus with three schools, 16 departments and 43 academic programs and research centers. The college provides the core curriculum for all University of Arkansas students and is named for J. William Fulbright, former university president and longtime U.S. senator.

About the University of Arkansas: The University of Arkansas provides an internationally competitive education for undergraduate and graduate students in more than 200 academic programs. The university contributes new knowledge, economic development, basic and applied research, and creative activity while also providing service to academic and professional disciplines. The Carnegie Foundation classifies the University of Arkansas among only 2 percent of universities in America that have the highest level of research activity. U.S. News & World Reportranks the University of Arkansas among its top American public research universities. Founded in 1871, the University of Arkansas comprises 10 colleges and schools and maintains a low student-to-faculty ratio that promotes personal attention and close mentoring.