Brian Haas

Broken Arrow, and a change of major

Brian Roy Haas was born on 18 March 1974 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and grew up in Broken Arrow, on the city's south-eastern edge. He started at the keyboard as a small child — his own biography puts it at four, Wikipedia's account at five — and came up through the classical competition circuit, winning at local and regional level before taking the Oklahoma Concerto Competition at sixteen.

That record earned him a scholarship to study classical music at the University of Tulsa. He did not stay in the discipline. Partway through, having got interested in jazz, he switched his major, and left in 1996 with a Bachelor of Arts in Music. The switch is the hinge of everything that followed: the classical training stayed in the hands, the repertoire did not.

He has described the influence of the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whom he worked with at the university in the mid-1990s, in terms that still read as his working method: the greatest classical composers were the best improvisers, so be yourself, do not worry about genres, do something nobody else can do.

Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey

Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey — JFJO, or simply the Fred — began in Tulsa while Haas was still a student, and he has led it as keyboardist and composer ever since. There has never been anybody in the band called Jacob Fred. The music sits between jazz, rock and funk, with the debts openly stated: electric-period Miles Davis, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Larry Young, Hendrix.

The band became a touring operation rather than a local one. Haas's biography counts thirteen European tours alongside festival and concert-hall work across the Americas, and roughly forty albums of original composition under his name across all his projects. A profile published on 16 September 2026 noted that JFJO is still going after more than thirty years, which makes it one of the longer-running instrumental bands to come out of the American Midwest without ever passing through a major label's hands.

The group's most serious piece of writing is a 2011 suite responding to the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 — a subject the city spent most of a century not discussing, addressed by a band that had been playing its rock clubs since the mid-1990s. Haas's own catalogue outside the band starts with The Truth About Hollywood in 2005, a debut that set his originals next to Thelonious Monk covers. He records for Royal Potato Family.

The other two bands

Since 2016 Haas has played piano in Nolatet, which pairs him and the vibraphonist and percussionist Mike Dillon with the New Orleans rhythm section of bassist James Singleton and drummer Johnny Vidacovich. Singleton and Vidacovich have spent decades together in Astral Project; Dillon has worked with Les Claypool, Ani DiFranco and Rickie Lee Jones. The arithmetic of that quartet — two Midwestern club improvisers plus two Crescent City veterans — accounts for most of what the records sound like.

Punkadelick is the louder one: a trio of Haas, Dillon and the drummer Nikki Glaspie. Their album came out in the winter of 2023 through Sony Red and was followed, by Haas's own account, by a seventeen-month run of sold-out shows.

Alongside the touring he teaches improvised music in public schools through programmes funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is a fairly rare thing for a player at his level to keep doing for this long.

Somethin' To Relax With

Nolatet's third album, Somethin' To Relax With, was released on 3 April 2026 by RPF Records/Royal Potato Family on 180-gram vinyl and digitally. It was cut live at LowDown in Tulsa across two sold-out shows in 2025 — the band recording in Haas's home city rather than Dillon's, Singleton's and Vidacovich's. Haas's reasoning was blunt: the kinetic energy of a live audience makes for a more energetic, riskier album.

There are six pieces — Switchback, the title track, Doc Richter To You, Black Pencil, Cluster and Surely Hazard — and all of them are the band's own. The working principle is rough sketches rather than finished charts, with collective improvisation taking precedence over the written material.

A preview on 19 February 2026 picked out the title track, a blues, as the lead single, and described Haas teasing at going outside in something like Don Pullen's manner before pulling himself back in time to hand over to the bass. A review on 3 May 2026 placed the record as the mature form of the 1990s and 2000s Midwestern jazz underground that produced JFJO and Malachy Papers — jazz played in rock clubs, away from the institutions — and heard the six tracks moving between pensive and playful, applying a disruptive punk sensibility to territory associated with Bobby Hutcherson and Monk. Its verdict on the title was that this is less something to relax with than something to party with, at a safe distance from conventional jazz culture.

The April release run took the quartet to Garcia's in Chicago on the 8th, two shows at Dazzle in Denver on the 16th, and New Orleans on the 28th and 29th.

Where he is right now

Haas spent the late summer working in the smallest of his formats: a duo with Dillon at Paradiso, 903 Early Street, Santa Fe, on Sunday 30 August 2026, billed simply as piano and vibraphone and scheduled from 7.30pm to 10pm. Piano against vibes, no rhythm section to hide behind.

Then Nolatet came back to Tulsa. The quartet played LowDown on Saturday 19 September 2026 to mark the release of the album they had recorded in that room, doors half an hour before the 9pm start. A review published on 23 September 2026 described the opening number shifting from the soft pitter-patter of easy-listening chords into gritty, harmonically agnostic gravel, with tabla turning up among the more expected instruments, and credited the band with humour and structural unpredictability held together by tight playing. Its summary was that a Nolatet show reliably produces at least one moment that defies comprehension.

Nolatet has previously played Tulsa as a trio, with Dillon covering drums, percussion and vibraphone — an indication of how readily this group reshapes itself around whoever is in the room.