Grammy Award-winning trombonist Michael Dease will perform with Southeast Missouri State University students in the 17th annual Clark Terry/Phi Mu Alpha Jazz Festival.

"Phi Mu Alpha is a music fraternity that runs the jazz festival," Dr. Robert Conger, director of the jazz program at Southeast, said. "Brothers in the fraternity guide each band from the moment they arrive on our campus until their performance is complete. During that time they make sure that the band director has his or her questions answered in a timely manner as well as making sure they stay on schedule. With 26 bands this year, that is a lot of work."

Conger described the event as "clinics on jazz" where Dease will teach students from surrounding high and junior high schools about jazz on Feb. 6-7. The gala concert will be held on Feb. 6.

These events will also be accompanied by "mini concerts" at noon on both days.

"I first heard Michael play the trombone at the International Trombone Workshop in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2012," Conger said. "His playing is simply phenomenal."

Christopher Boyd, vice president of Phi Mu Alpha, said that the time slots for participating bands were filled as of Jan. 25.

"We got a lot of schools, and they all come down, spend the day here, and have a concert that night with Michael Dease," Boyd said. "He's a world-famous trombone player, and he's going to be playing with our bands like the studio jazz ensemble and jazz lab. It's going to be really cool."

Several years after the event was founded, Phi Mu Alpha was commissioned to help with it, and it has been a joint event ever since.

Boyd said many of the people helping with the jazz festival are also involved with Phi Mu Alpha.

"... We are basically the thing that makes the festival run," Boyd said.

Boyd said many of the educators are members of Phi Mu Alpha as well.

"Even Dr. Conger is in Phi Mu Alpha, himself. We initiated him in '06, I think, and everybody who is helping out with the event is Phi Mu Alpha," Boyd said. "Everybody who runs the board is Phi Mu Alpha. ... Even the school's band directors, a lot of them are Phi Mu Alpha too, because we are a national organization, and I know even back in my high school, a lot of my music teachers were Phi Mu Alpha."

Boyd said that music and art are important to students, and these types of performances are the way they show it.

"The main focus is, of course, the educational opportunity afforded to the high school and junior high students who will attend the festival," Conger said. "We hope that they will also have fun playing music, but the purpose of including music in their education is to teach a well-rounded child as the Greeks espoused many centuries ago."

Conger said jazz enables people to demonstrate creativity by improvising the music because jazz deviates from the written music. Boyd agreed with this point.

"... Jazz is like the American art form, like that's one of the few [styles] that was specifically created in America by Americans," Boyd said. "You have classical [music] dating back to the 1300s in England and Italy, and then you have rock which can even be traced back to England if you wanted to, but jazz is something that is strictly American, and it is an art form that we take very seriously. It's something that gives you that freedom to express yourself because the thing about jazz is it's improvisational based. So it's one of the few art forms where you get to improvise. ... It's important to let students know that improvising is very helpful to hone in your craft, and improvisation is something that all students, I think, should learn. And jazz is that thing that kind of gets you there."

Boyd expects the festival to go well. His main concern is the possibility of severe weather and schools dropping from participation.

According to Conger, there's still work to be done on the festival.

"Setting up everything with all the logistics is the biggest challenge on my part, which is in addition to preparing two jazz big bands: five saxes, five trombones, four trumpets and rhythm section for their first concert of the semester only three weeks in," Conger said.

Boyd said that as the schools perform, regional educators will judge and make recordings of the performances for the band to review later and to give them an idea of what to correct for the next festival.

The Clark Terry/Phi Mu Alpha Jazz Festival Gala Concert is at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 6 in the Donald C. Bedell Performance Hall at the River Campus. General admission tickets are listed at $10.

From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Feb. 7, admission to hear the bands is free.