LIVE EVENTS
The Eddie Durham Jazz Festival returns this Saturday, welcoming renowned musicians as well as an art installation by Hank Hehmsoth to Eddie Durham Park, located at 205 MLK Drive across from the Calaboose African American History Museum, sponsor of the event.
Blues guitarist Michael ‘Murch” Powers headlines a star-studded lineup that also includes Morris Nelms and the Calaboose Players, Sonia Love, the Swing Junction Swing Dancers, the Texas State University Jazz Ensemble and Austin-based soul band Tomar and the FCs. In a four-star review of the “Onyx Root” album for The Guardian newspaper, critic Robin Denselow said Powers is a “good, varied player … but what makes him special is the way he makes old songs his own.”
“Onyx Root” includes covers of garage rock favorite “Psychotic Reaction” and the Sir Douglas Quintet’s classic, “She’s About a Mover,” as well as blues songs by Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters. Powers has also covered songs by Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, Santana and Leonard Cohen. He has been nominated for multiple Blues Music Awards and Grammy awards.
San Marcos native Eddie Durham was a gifted and influential jazz guitarist, trombonist, composer and arranger in the Big Band era of the 1930s and 1940s. His work contributed to the popularity of Glen Miller, Bennie Moten, Count Basie and Jimmie Lunceford. He is credited with being the first person to record an amplified guitar when he was featured on the 1935 Jimmie Lunceford recording of Durham’s arrangement of “Hittin’ the Bottle.”
The Calaboose website refers to him as “a musical trailblazer whose genius helped shape the Swing Era.”
“Topsy” Durham, Eddie’s daughter, and author of “Swingin’ the Blues – The Virtuosity of Eddie Durham,” is usually the MC for the event, which she co-founded. However this year, she is not able to attend and will be replaced by Gene Randall of KZSM.
An art exhibit at the Cephas House during the festival will feature the paintings of Hank Hehmsoth, a Texas State University Professor of Practice and established jazz musician with decades of teaching and performing experience. Perhaps his best-known work is his piano intro to the Christopher Cross classic “Sailing,” but he has written more than 200 compositions, ranging from works for small jazz ensembles to scores for large orchestras.
His resume also includes several projects as a jazz historian, and this is where his career overlaps with that of Eddie Durham. Hehmsoth played a key role in re-establishing Durham as a central figure in the development of jazz, producing the “All About Eddie Durham” film with funding from a National Endowment of the Arts grant and Texas State University. The film features rare archival footage and interviews with Durham. He also served as a consultant for the PBS documentary on Durham, “Wham-Re-Bop-Boom-Bam: The Swing Jazz of Eddie Durham.”
During his interview with the Daily Record, Hehmsoth was enthusiastic while discussing Durham’s legacy, sharing stories about his youth in San Marcos as well as anecdotes about Durham’s lasting jazz legacy.
When Durham was growing up in San Marcos, he found some creative ways to earn money, according to Hehmsoth.
“Eddie, when he was just a kid with his dad, they were rattlesnake hunters, and they would go find a snake pit and grab and kill the snakes. They’d hang their skins over clothes lines. And then Eddie would cut off the rattles and sell them for 25 cents a piece in downtown San Marcos.”
Hehmsoth added that back when Eddie was young, and to some extent a belief that continues to this day, fiddle players believed placing a rattlesnake’s rattle in their fiddles creates a fuzz tone that made them sound similar to guitars… plus the “rattles kept the bugs away.”
Young Eddie’s ingenuity extended to his early years playing guitar, when his instrument was not loud enough to be heard over a band. Like his father, who made fiddles out of cigar boxes, Eddie built his own instruments, eventually figuring out how to add a microphone inside of this guitar so it could be run through a PA system.
Once Eddie left San Marcos to join bands in Oklahoma City, Kansas City and New York City, he was a sought-after musician who became the first jazz guitarist ever recorded. And his creative approach to recording music continued to appeal to Swing Band leaders.
He played in a band called The Blue Devils, according to Hehmsoth, “And they made these recordings that had this groove to them that was brand new, and it made everybody’s ears perk up. And people said, ‘I want to know how to do that.’ He knew how to arrange for trombones and big bands. So he was a celebrity, he became the guy that everybody hired to arrange.”
Hehmsoth contributed a colorized photo to the PBS documentary about Durham, but it wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic that he began to focus more on his art. He could not play live gigs, so he began to paint for the first time in 20 years.
Painting and playing the piano are skills which require a similar approach, Hehmsoth said.
“I’ve been an improviser on keyboards, and there’s a big similarity between how you interface your hand with the keyboard when you improvise, and your hand when you’re painting. You’ve got one chance to pull the brush across the canvas. If you don’t, you’ve messed it up. So the way your hand interfaces with whatever you’re doing, and that improvisation moment is something I’m really fixated on.”
Beyond the physical similarities between painting and playing the piano, he talked about the similarities in the mindset which leads to creative inspiration in art and music.
“Both painting and jazz improvisation have that zone you go into where you try to stop thinking and let things happen spontaneously. … you want to get into the zone and let go “Some of my paintings are an attempt to translate rhythm or harmony and improvisation into color. … There’s a connection between sounds and sight, whether it’s geometric forms or manipulation of the human form into some kind of abstraction.” He created separate paintings for each of the nine tracks of his album “Blu-Escape.”
In February of 2026, Hehmsoth will further explore this relationship between visual art and music at his “Seeing Sound, Hearing Color” residency at Brazosport College in Lake Jackson. The interdisciplinary residency will include a solo exhibition of his art work, a concert with his current Jazz group Double Vision (with saxophonist John Mills) and discussions about the relationship between art and music.
Hehmsoth’s film “All About Eddie Durham” will be showing in the Cephas House next to his paintings during the Eddie Durham Jazz Festival.
The free event is scheduled to run from 11-5, and will feature food trucks and arts and crafts vendors. MLK Drive will be closed between Fredericksburg Street and Comanche Street.
