With the new club and the new non-profit organization, the local jazz scene is facing a revival

It is the transience that is the decisive factor.

For a culture that records and shares fleeting moments – like so many Skittles – and for marketers who seek to emulate spontaneity through planning and precision, inspired and fleeting moments can be a rare and prized commodity.

However, it is not uncommon at R Wine Bar & Kitchen.

Except for an eight-month COVID hiatus, the East Eighth Street hangout has hosted a jazz night every Thursday since it opened in late 2018.

Week after week, improvised sequences of notes and melodies emerge that live on only in memories and feelings, floating through the intoxicating air and occasionally escaping through the doors as guests enter or exit.

It can be as exhilarating as it is rare. At least it is for Dan Heier, a drummer and frequent player at R Wine Bar and co-founder of the just-opened Fellowship Jazz Center.

There is an element of ephemerality in any live event, but jazz’s emphasis on improvisation takes it to a new level.

“What’s happening tonight will never happen again,” the drummer said. “These notes will never come together the same way again, and you have to be there to be a part of it.”

Heier and his Fellowship Jazz Center co-founder, trumpeter Jim Speirs, aim to nurture the next generation of musicians and fans through education, outreach and performances.

The R Wine Bar and its soon-to-open cousin, the Trio Jazz Club, play a big part in that story. For the past five years, Heier has been the main organizer of another R Wine Bar jazz classic: the First Wednesday Jam Night.

On these evenings, anyone who owns an instrument and wants to join the band can come along and play a solo or two. With the founding of the Fellowship Jazz Center, these events will take on a new role.

The idea, which was first implemented on May 1, is to start the evening for musicians of all ages with about an hour of jazz instruction from a professional musician, then move to a performance venue to give the musicians the opportunity to try out their new skills.

The first event featured Willie Murilla, a session trumpeter from Los Angeles.

“We had a fifth-grader there, but also someone in his 60s,” said Heier, who teaches drums in between performances with the National Guard Band and various jazz groups. “There really is something for everyone.”

There will be more education and outreach to come, but Heier said the center is in “discovery mode” to figure out what that might look like.

One model could be similar to the Jazz Diversity Project, which taught jazz to elementary and middle school students in social studies classes.

For the group’s launch last month, the center partnered with the State Theatre to perform “Miles Ahead,” a 2015 biopic starring Don Cheadle as Miles Davis.

At the end of April, the center organized a “Jazz Crawl” in which groups played at five venues on Eighth Street.

Live performances will always be an important part of the center’s mission, Heier said. The nonprofit group’s website lists upcoming performances around the city and it works to recruit talent for various venues.

Gene McGowan & Friends perform regularly at the Center-sponsored History Club of Sioux Falls, an event that began as the pianist’s annual birthday jam session and expanded into a public performance last year.

The center’s creation is intended, in part, to fill the void left by the demise of the Sioux Falls Jazz & Blues Society, several years after the end of JazzFest, the free music weekend at Yankton Trail Park.

Five years after the last JazzFest, the city is, ironically, more ready than ever to welcome live jazz.

Riccardo Tarabelsi is banking on it. He and his wife Marybeth own the R Wine Bar as well as the Maribella Ristorante and Vespa Catering. The Trio Jazz Club will be right next to the Maribella on Washington Square and will offer live jazz five nights a week.

Almost all of the jazz will shift from R Wine Bar to Trio, although R will host the Hegg Brothers every Friday and various performances on Saturdays.

After nearly six years of live jazz at R Wine Bar, Tarabelsi is convinced that Sioux Falls can support its own full-fledged jazz club.

The fans, he said, are committed.

“Some Thursdays we have a real snowstorm, but then we have a jazz night and people still come,” Tarabelsi said.

And it’s best experienced live, he said. The passion of the players and the way the mood in the room or the personalities of the musicians affect the shape of a song, the inspired licks and the wrong notes that “nobody hears but the bass player” are all elements that set jazz apart from other art forms.

If you’ve never been to a jazz show, it’s worth a try, Tarabelsi said.

“It’s one thing to hear it. It’s another to experience it,” he said. “Over the years, so many people have come to a jazz night and said, ‘I didn’t know I was a jazz fan until tonight.'”