Over the next few days, during the Knoxville Jazz Festival, the role of jazz in the Knoxville music scene will be redefined. With a host of established local, national and international musicians giving performances and master classes, this year’s festival promises to leave a lasting impression on both the local jazz and mainstream music communities.

Sponsored by the Knox County Public Library with the help of jazz piano professor Donald Brown, the festival’s lineup is a “Who’s Who” of talented musicians. On opening day, the University of Tennessee’s own Boling, Brown & Holloway Trio will give a performance at the East Tennessee Historic Center. Special guest Jeff Coffin, a saxophonist for Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, a group that just won its second Best Contemporary Jazz Recording Grammy, will join them. Mark Boling, guitarist of the group and UT professor, said he’s very excited about being a part of the pivotal music event.

“Donald (Brown) called us up to play and bring a guest, and I played with Jeff a couple of times over the summer. (He) really likes to play. So, we’re going to do a couple of his tunes, a couple of mine and then some others.”

Though he has had limited experience playing with the trio and an even narrower window of free time while working with the Flecktones, Coffin thinks that the festival, along with Knoxville’s rich jazz history, is plenty reason enough to participate.

“Some really incredible improvising musicians live (in Knoxville). There’s been a large standing tradition (of) high caliber musicians like Jerry Coker, Rusty and Mark Boling, Keith Brown — just really great musicians that not only are teaching but are known internationally.”

Although Coffin is a Nashville-based musician, he is in tune with Knoxville’s jazz roots. By 1976, when Jerry Coker, retired professor Emeritus and saxophone soloist for Frank Sinatra, Woody Herman and Stan Kenton, among others, pioneered one of the first jazz programs in the country, the city was already known as an outgrowth of the Memphis and Nashville jazz scenes.

As the program developed, it attracted the likes of Donald Brown, the professors involved in the trio and Vance Thompson, trumpet professor and band leader of the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra, as well as many other outstanding musicians who call Knoxville home.

Yet, only recently has Knoxville’s reputation as a premier jazz hub given rise to the annual jazz festival. While attracting numerous visiting artists, the festival also serves to foster the talent and inspiration of the area’s younger musicians. And Boling added that without the help of Knoxville institutions like the Knox County Library and the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra, this event wouldn’t be possible.

“They’ve been doing concerts at the library for a while,” Boling said. “I think it’s great that they’re doing things like this … that they’re involved with the arts. It almost takes a public institution that’s interested in the arts to be successful at something like this.”

And having an experienced faculty doesn’t hurt either.

“We’ve got one of the great treasures of the world here: Donald Brown,” Nelda Hill, manager of the Lawson McGhee Library, said. “And we have a lot of good home-grown jazz musicians.”

The festival continues on Friday with a performance by the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra playing with New York trumpeter and arranger Bill Mobley at the ETHC. A very promising 14-year-old piano student of Brown’s will open the KJO concert, and the event also serves as an album release performance for Donald Brown’s newest recording, “Blues Man from Memphis.” The compact disc was recorded in part last year in the Cox Auditorium with special guests Stephon Harris and John Clayton along with the KJO.

On Saturday, Bobby Lyle, who visited the Bijou Theatre last semester alongside pianist virtuoso Geoffrey Keezer, will perform the final concert of the festival at the Bijou with Grammy award-winning trumpeter Nicholas Payton.

And as if these performances weren’t enough, master classes will be given on Thursday, Friday and Saturday by all the guest performers. These free classes will be held at the ETHC and all students and locals are welcome to attend. The master classes will help students define the role jazz plays in these professionals’ lives, as well as the role it plays within the local community. Coffin said that though the ideas behind jazz have permeated his whole life, his own personal definition of the word is harder to define.

“I don’t even know what it means quite honestly. Is it Bix Beiderbecke, or is it Louis Armstrong, or is it Charlie Parker? Is it Ornette, or Miles, or Trane, or Albert Ayler, or is it Brecker? I’m not really sure what that genre means anymore because it’s really morphed so much. I think it gets lumped into the genre of instrumental music,” Coffin said.

But Coffin adds that the most important thing about the music is its spirit, displayed mainly through the improvisation.

The Knoxville Jazz Festival’s performances and master classes will be held at the ETHC and the Bijou Theatre starting today and ending on Saturday evening.