Starting on Thursday, March 16th, one of Boston’s newest performance venues will come to life for a weekend of exuberant, rewarding, and varied jazz performances. Four different artists and their ensembles will bring their own version of jazz to Arrow Street Arts (the former Oberon) in Harvard Square for the Celebrity Series Jazz Fest . The festival encompasses a wide range of sounds and instruments, with band leaders working from the piano, upright bass, and even the harp! All four featured artists are united in their probing of a deep musical tradition, hunger to bring their own individuality to jazz, and their love of a challenge. The festival will also feature some fantastic contrasts as each artist pulls their material from different areas of the patchwork of traditions woven into jazz history.

Each performer will play two sets each night, at 7pm and 9pm, except for the Sunday sets, at 5pm and 7pm. Before the festival, GBH Music’s Jazz on 89.7 hosts Al Davis and Va Lynda Robinson made time to talk to all four featured artists. Portions of their conversations are transcribed below:

Sean Mason

Sean Mason is a rising composer and pianist originally from Charlotte, North Carolina, and is celebrated for his recent albums with Catherine Russell and Mahogany L. Brown. He opens the festival on Thursday March 13th with his quartet, all of whom played on his 2023 debut “The Southern Suite.”

On what audiences should expect at the Jazz Fest:
It should be fun! At least it’s fun for us. We pretty much smile the entire time. The music is so fun to play and it’s crazy: you can have the roughest travel day, and then as soon as we hit the first note we’re just laughing. I think that the music ultimately is optimistic in nature, but that optimism comes with a bit of nuance. I think that’s the purpose of “The Southern Suite,” to put a little bit of optimism in the music, because most people in my age group at least aren’t dealing with optimism.

On “The Southern Suite,” his debut album:
Well, it was an homage back home to the south, you know, from a New York perspective. And I wrote it as a statement reaffirming the Blues, reaffirming, I guess, the tradition that I was raised in. I mean, one of the good things about the South is that tradition is still valued, but it’s not… how do I put this? It’s not fetishized. I think that tradition can sometimes be fetishized, as if we’re stuck in the past. I think in the South, we honor the tradition, and you’re raised on the tradition, but you’re also raised on individuality. And that dichotomy is exactly what I wanted to put into that album. It’s also the philosophy in which I love to compose and play music: to honor what came before me, but also express my individuality into the future.

Linda May Han Oh

Linda May Han Oh is a bass player and band leader originally from Australia, acclaimed for her work with Terri Lynn Carrington and Vijay Iyer, and her latest album “The Glass Hours.” She’s also a beloved professor at Berklee College of Music. She’ll be accompanied by her band, also called The Glass Hours, on Friday March 14th .

On what excites her about the Celebrity Series Jazz Fest:
I haven’t played in this venue before, Arrow Street Arts, and I’ve heard so many great things! I’m excited about the different billings! I’ve known Brandee Younger for a long, long time. We used to do gigs way back when with Courtney Bryan when I first moved to New York City. Also I love up and coming bassist, Mali Obomsawin. I got a chance to meet and play with Mali very briefly at the Winter Jazz Fest. We got to talk a little bit, and we’re actually going to have a bit of a bass hang the day of my show. I’m just thrilled about the programming.

On becoming a bandleader:
When I first moved to New York City, I really just wanted to be a strong bassist. I wasn’t so interested in being a band leader. I like to compose, but I would look at bass players like Larry Grenadier, James Genus, Christian McBride, Robert Hurst and see how well they could just hold a band together. And really, that’s what I was aiming to do. When I moved to New York, I realized that I really liked composing and writing for different ensembles, and eventually I just started my own band. “The Glass Hours” is a project that’s very near and dear to me. It’s written for a quintet, but the idea is that I try to write in such a way that it sounds bigger than a quintet, so we use a lot of vocals mixed in. The songs are really a mixed bag of emotions.

Mali Obomsawin

Mali Obomsawin is a bassist, band leader, and composer from the Odanak First Nation, who’ll be leading her quintet through several new compositions. She recently composed the score to the Oscar nominated documentary “Sugarcane,” and regularly performs with her rock duo, Deerlady. She performs Saturday March 15th .

On her connection to her bass:
It … feels like home. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s a big tree. It’s a big hollowed out tree. You know ? What could be wrong with that? I recently had the pleasure of spending some time with Esperanza Spalding at the Kennedy Center. The Indigenous Big Band did a collaboration with her for the Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival. It was so exciting and amazing, and we had a duet together. I arranged a piece for us to perform, and when she was introducing it, she was talking about the bass as a conjuring instrument, which I really related to. It’s so big and it’s so vibratory and it’s a very responsive instrument. It really has a mind and a mission of its own. I think basses have a lot of agency. So I feel like a very strong relationship in the truest, most equitable sense of the word, where some days I pick the bass up and it might not want to be played, or it might not want to be doing it that way, you know, and it really is about communication.

On composing her first film score, for the Oscar nominated documentary, “Sugarcane”:
I think that the imagery and the story itself made it easy for me to do that job, and I was really happy to incorporate this sort of improvisatory and extended techniques, stuff that I do in my own bands into a setting where you might not usually hear it. The film is about the legacy of the Catholic Church. [The Church] was contracted by the federal government of Canada (and was also contracted by the federal government of the US for the same mission), to take indigenous children from the reservations and disallow the speaking of their languages and the learning of their culture. It was a genocidal policy that lasted for 100 years. So when I was writing the score to this, I knew that I needed to incorporate sounds that are familiar to folks who might have grown up in relation to the Catholic Church, or with that in their community. My own nation definitely has a lot of church songs. Some of them are in Abenaki and some of them are in French, and some of them are in English. So I used sounds from hymns that I know, the church organ sounds, but I also incorporated this sort of gritty country western guitar tone. And then I mentioned the experimental bass techniques: those are the major musical threads of that work.

Brandee Younger

The Celebrity Series Jazz Fest wraps on Sunday March 16th with Brandee Younger and her trio. Younger is a harpist whose recent release “Brand New Life” pays tribute to Dorothy Ashby, a pioneering jazz harpist.

On the growing up a Black harpist:
First of all, the harp is not the most common instrument. Period. Second of all, there’s not a lot of people that look like us playing it. And thirdly, when it comes to taking the instrument outside of its expected genre, which is mostly orchestral and classical music, it’s slim, slim, slim pickings. So to have Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane as inspiration for me was everything because, you know, they say “representation is everything.” It’s actually quite true, because when you don’t see someone like you doing something, you don’t think that it’s for you. Alice Coltrane’s “Blue Nile” for me… hearing the harp in the context of a rhythm section made it so special because I was like, “Whatever’s happening here is what I’m missing!”

On unique aspects of her live shows:
Usually when people don’t know me and they come to a concert, they’re surprised at how silly I am. I speak a lot to the audience, and I’m silly! On the music… we always make sure there’s one Alice Coltrane, and there’s one Dorothy Ashby. There’s a lot of my original music… and then, depending on the audience, if they seem like they’re ready for it, we throw in a little Marvin.

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The Celebrity Series Jazz Fest kicks off Thursday night, March 13th, and concludes Sunday March 15th at Arrow Street Arts in Harvard Square.