Something begins at 7 p.m. Thursday at Seven Seas Inn in Mandan. A debut of something.

It's just not clear yet what that something is. It has no name.

John Wayland Harr, 22, and six other local jazz musicians from other bands are coming together to form a new band that debuts Thursday and will feature original tunes from the band's three songwriters - as well as jazz tunes so new they haven't been played in this area, Harr said. Like new tunes by such jazz musicians as bass player Dave Holland, who was a sideman for Miles Davis at one time.

The seven musicians - who bring to the new band guitar skills, saxophone, flute, trumpet, trombone and percussion - haven't been able to come up with just the right name.

So it will probably debut that way.

But there is another name for Harr, some say:"Obsessed."

"He is a person who is obsessed with the guitar, constantly practicing - and all of that is coming to fruition now," said Scott Prebys, the University of Mary's jazz studies director.

Prebys said Harr, a past student of his, is a well-read intellectual who's also "a very quiet kid who speaks through his instrument."

Harr, a U-Mary senior, rents with his brother, Joe Harr - also a U-Mary student - a Bismarck house so small that his kitchen table wouldn't fit in the kitchen. So it was lying on its side recently outside by the house when it got rained on and was ruined, and now is awaiting disposal. The house's exterior looks tired, the paint semi-lackluster. The mailbox outside near the door has a spider-web blanket.

Harr said he has priorities.

His guitars are babied, no spider webs on them. And wherever he goes, a guitar goes, said his mom, Shari Harr, 46, of Zell, S.D.

In the summer months, he plays about six to seven hours a day. Now, during the school year, he still gets in three to four hours of playing time a day, he guessed. Between classes, he's teaching private guitar lessons, and lessons at a local elementary, and performing and working part-time with people with challenges at Pride Inc.

When he plays, he looks sometimes like he's deep in prayer, head bowed, looking lost yet found, while he touches the strings and the music comes.

Even though he doesn't play much classical music, he plays a classical guitar, with nylon strings, because of the range of tones he can get from those strings - from "so tender" to really aggressive.

He said a goal is to bring out a reflection of his soul, his disposition, to the audience, through the guitar. Prebys said he thinks it has come to that.

"His musical vocabulary is an extension of his personality," Prebys said.

People who have seen Harr at local coffee houses and other venues often get a buffet. There might be some country, folk, classical or jazz.

Harr grew up on a farm near Zell and enjoys going back for visits, but said he never felt like he fit in there, even though he did get a reputation as a skillful dairy foods judge. He said he was friends with the farm kids. But he said while their identity seemed to be tied to the farm and farm life, his wasn't.

He said he started learning piano at age 7 and saxophone in fifth grade, but it wasn't until seventh grade, when he got the idea to learn the guitar, that the obsession started.

"It's all I thought about,"he said.

His family was well aware that a guitar was absolutely the only thing he wanted for Christmas that year. He got his wish and started teaching himself on it.

Shari Harr said her son was an excellent student, kept up with his studies, and so she put up with listening to late-night guitar practicing, often until midnight.

"I (didn't) want to squelch his desire,"she said.

He admired legendary guitarist Chet Atkins' fingerpicking methods, worked on that style, and became a jazz fan because of public radio's nightly two-hour jazz program with "Uncle Jimmo."

But then alcohol came along.

"Idon't have the best social skills. It was a crutch,"he said.

He said he had two minor in possession arrests before graduating from high school. And a string of them during the start of his career at the University of Mary through the end of his sophomore year. Harr, now a senior, said he remembered his name was becoming familiar to law enforcement, and recalled a judge saying in a Burleigh County Courthouse courtroom, "Apparently … this young man isn't getting it."

A driving while intoxicated charge got him two days in jail, two days of missing classes for the near 4.0-GPA student, and then he had to go back to jail for couple of weekends.

"My college instructors were losing patience,"he said.

He said it was while in the Burleigh County jail that something happened that turned the corner for him. He said he went into the jail's library and there was a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita, an ancient Sanskrit text that explores the path to living a good life.

"It gave me hope, faith," he said. "It empowered me with some control."

Harr said through that book and other Eastern philosophy resources, he began to realize the teachings about renunciation and control over passions.

"I always meditate before I go to bed," he said. "I've learned a lot from sitting on a cushion and thinking of nothing."

He said he began to focus his energy again on the guitar.

His life is about music now - his and others'. After seeing a performance by jazz guitarist John Scofield in Minneapolis, he said, "For months after the event, I couldn't get over it."

He said when he starts thinking about how nice it would be to have a relationship, date, he quiets the voice. He wants to keep his focus.

John Krueger, one of the two saxophonists for the new band, said he sees Harr as a role model. Krueger is trying to finish a degree at U-Mary, raise a daughter and live his jazz at the same time.

"He's a player that's trying to do the most creative thing every time he plays a note," Krueger said.

Krueger does something of that himself, bringing more to his music through everyday ways. He recalled, for example, hearing a cash register close at a coffee shop one time, and he loved the rhythm of it and incorporated it into his playing.

Thursday's performance of the no-name band, made up of some former members of the John Krueger Quartet and the Quartet, will have some original tunes, some with a Latin flavor, others in the New Orleans blues style.

Besides Harr and Krueger, band members are Weston Schick, sax and flutes; Tony Sladland, trumpet and guitar; Mike Smith, percussion; Brandon Clayson, bass; and Dave Lambert, trombone.

In addition to the Thursday Seven Seas gig, the new band will play at the Applefest at Buckstop Junction from 3 to 4 p.m. Saturday.

(Reach reporter Virginia Grantier at 250-8254 or at virginia.grantier@;bismarcktribune.com.)