The Averitt Center in downtown Statesboro will be hosting The Jazz Legacy Project (JLP) featuring the music of Nancy Wilson on January 25 at 7:30pm.
Created in 2015 after an epiphany Justin Varnes had while teaching Jazz History at Georgia State University, the JLP has an ongoing residency at the Velvet Note jazz club in Atlanta, where they have been selling out their performances for 6 years and counting. The Jazz Legacy Project is a band that pays tribute to a historical jazz singer through a featured vocalist on each of their tours.
Click here for tickets to experience this impressive tribute to jazz at the Averitt Center in January!
“Our main goal here is to bring back some of this great music, great jazz from the traditional jazz era and reintroduce it to a new audience,” said band lead Justin Varnes. “For those who grew up listening to it and don’t get to hear it very much, we’re trying to bring back that sound.”
The show at the Averitt Center will feature vocalist Karla Harris who will be honoring jazz singer Nancy Wilson. Nancy Wilson was a jazz singer most popular in the 1960s.
Harris has been a professional singer for all of her adult life. She is originally from St. Louis, Missouri but has lived in Atlanta since 2012.
“I’m a lifelong Nancy Wilson fan,” said Harris. “She was in my parents’ album stack and she was the first person I heard sing jazz standards.”
Justin Varnes is the creator of The Jazz Legacy Project and the band lead.
“One of the things that was kind of the impetus for this project is getting to tell the stories of these great artists because the music is great, but it was so long ago that we lose context,” said Justin Varnes.
One of the goals that Varnes has is to appeal to different communities. The Jazz Legacy Project performs two or three times a year at certain theaters to present different artists to tell a “different version of the jazz story.”
“At heart, she was able to get to the core of a song and express it in a way that made you feel it,” said Harris. “To me, that is the whole object of why we should be doing what we’re doing.”
“It’s happened a lot where somebody after the concert walks up to me or walks up to any of us and said 'that was great and I don’t like jazz'”, Varnes said. “To be able to inspire anyone from the audience to then go out and listen to a little bit more of these great artists’ music has easily been my favorite part.”
The Jazz Legacy will be honoring Nancy Wilson on January 25th at 7:30 pm. Find more details at The Averitt Center for the Arts events page here.
“We want the person who walks in who knows nothing about jazz, we want them to feel like they’re welcome and we’re happy that they’re there,” Varnes said.
