Billings Jazz Hero
Billings, Montana is 1,500 miles from New Orleans, and about 850 from Kansas City. You’ve got to drive some 1,000 miles to Chicago, and New York City is almost twice that distance. Nobody around here calls anyone else “cat.” This is about as far from jazz country as you can get. Right?
Not if Alex Nauman has anything to say about it. He’s a consummate guitarist, but Nauman’s true talents lay in networking and communion, helping fill the ocean and making sure the jazz tide will keep rising. He’s taught at nearly every higher learning institution in the region. For over a decade, Nauman helped lead a weekly jazz jam in Billings that served as an opportunity for newbies to get better and good players to hone their craft. He’s not involved with it anymore, but not only is the jam still going, it’s spawned a weekly sister show on the other side of town.
“So much of this scene is what people can make out of it,” Nauman says. “You can do whatever you want. You can carve your own destiny.”
By his own count, Nauman is involved in “seven to 20” different bands at any given moment, depending on how you count it. One of them is Pattern Addicts, and as a recording project it’s Nauman playing every note, sometimes layering 25 guitars on top of each other until they sound like a one-man symphony. But live it’s a psychedelic groove combo boasting a four-guitar frontline. One of those instruments is helmed by Alex Peel, whom Nauman taught to play guitar way back when. Stay in a scene long enough and you’ll wind up like It’s a Wonderful Life’s George Bailey, reaping the rewards from the community you helped incubate.
He’s built a better community in spite of widespread inertia. Anyone who’s tried to do much of anything in Billings can tell you that isn’t always easy. The largest town in Montana, it’s a good spot. It’s relatively safe and relatively prosperous, but, at times, relatively boring. Fiercely working class, it’s the type of place where art can have trouble finding an audience. Which is part of what makes succeeding here feel that much better. Anybody can swim in a pool, but there’s real magic in helping fill one up. That’s what Jazz Hero Alex Nauman’s doing.
—Jake Iverson
