The biggest women’s jazz festival in the world? It might be in Arlington Heights.

In a directory of jazz venues in the metro area, Hey Nonny is on few fans’ shortlist. Heck, it may not even crack their long list.

But in two short years, the downtown Arlington Heights venue has gone from a reliable, if not prolific, host of jazz acts to the home of what might be the largest women’s jazz festival, taking over the venue this year from Jan. 4 to 7. The Kennedy Center, the Schomburg Center in New York and Palm Springs all host jazz festivals focused on female bandleaders; Hey Nonny’s now exceeds them in number of acts (14) and length (four days).

“We’re not a jazz club, but we’ve had a lot of jazz at Hey Nonny. And we’ve got a lot of women playing as side players, but who don’t always get a chance to be leaders,” says Hey Nonny proprietor Chip Brooks.

What Hey Nonny straightforwardly calls the Women’s Jazz Festival debuted last year, in a more modest iteration featuring local artists. For a first run, the reception was outstanding, with 80% occupancy. But Hey Nonny had still greater ambitions, billing the festival even then as “what will become the world’s leading festival celebrating women in jazz.”

“We had a lot of passion, and just kind of jumped into the deep end … We wanted to do another festival bigger and better,” says festival co-producer Karuna Maddava.

To plug his own knowledge gaps about the jazz world, Brooks teamed up with Maddava, a loyal Hey Nonny patron and lifelong jazz fan, to organize the festival. Where others might spend their post-retirement years globe-trotting or picking up a new hobby, Maddava recently racked up a master’s degree in jazz history at Rutgers University, interviewing contemporary female jazz musicians for her thesis.

“There are all these fascinating stories, but they’re all about men. I thought, ‘There’s got to be somebody other than Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald,’” Maddava said. “Where are all the women instrumentalists?”

Thanks to a $30,000 grant from the Live Music Society, several women musicians — representing a cross-section of jazz’s many subgenres — will soon be in Arlington Heights. Multi-instrumentalist Shanta Nurullah performs with her East-meets-West ensemble Sitarsys on Jan. 4. Reedists Juli Wood, Natalie Lande and Natalie Scharf (calling themselves Natalies Wood) lead a Rahsaan Roland Kirk tribute on Jan. 5. To close out the whole thing, pianist Alexis Lombre and guitarist Mary Halvorson bring their hotshot bands to the neighboring Metropolis Theatre — Lombre with a sneak peek of a crossover-friendly project she’s bringing to the Winter Jazzfest in New York, Halvorson with the same avant-jazz sextet from her 2022 album “Amaryllis.”

“It’s not straight down the middle of, you know, cocktail-hour jazz. Some people definitely like that. But we’re trying to do things that are interesting. If we don’t provide a stage for that, then we’re not doing the right thing,” Brooks says.

Trumpeter Emily Kuhn, who plays with an abbreviated version of her big band Helios on Jan. 5, is among a few returnees from last year. As a young musician, she benefited from pedagogical spaces that prioritized girls and gender parity in jazz. The professional world, however, remains a different story.

“I think it’s harder as a woman to network and just fall into bands the way men do … And it can be pretty lonely, especially in big band settings, to be the only woman in a room full of 20 musicians. At various points, I’ve been pretty burnt out by that cycle,” Kuhn says. “It forced me to start writing my own music, book shows of my own, create my own bands and record my own album. I’ve made an intentional effort to play with more women and to make sure I’m surrounding myself with people who are aware of those dynamics and working against them.”

Lombre’s own career was shaped by gender in that she waited until college to “come out” as a singer, wary of how frequently female jazz artists get pigeonholed as, or assumed to be, vocalists. In recent years, though, Lombre has shrugged off that self-consciousness. The newly minted Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians member multitasks all over her Hey Nonny set, sampling selections from her upcoming album and the “Synesthesia” suite she debuted at last year’s Englewood Jazz Festival.

Along with AACM colleagues Coco Elysses and JoVia Armstrong, Lombre is also a member of flutist Nicole Mitchell’s all-women quartet Black Earth Sway, which released an album on Dec. 15. Armstrong, a drummer, brings her own group, Eunoia Society, to the festival the day before Lombre’s set (Jan. 6).

“We’re relaxed, down-to-earth, not really uptight. We’re just ourselves — and we do have a shared experience,” Lombre says. “I’m in my first few years of playing with them, where they have many, many years. But I just fit right into the soul.”

With a lineup both heavyweight and sufficiently eclectic, the Women’s Jazz Festival is pretty much self-recommending. Even so, Brooks and Maddava acknowledge the challenge of getting Hey Nonny on the radar of jazzheads. So far, they’ve spread the word through partners like jazz station WDCB and the Jazz Institute of Chicago.

But if last year’s festival is any indication, folks might show up for all sorts of reasons. Several patrons told Brooks and Maddava they were less interested in jazz than in the prospect of a women-led lineup. Another, a pal of Maddava’s and a “self-proclaimed jazz hater,” attended Yoko Noge’s Jazz Me Blues set last year as a favor for her friend. A conga line formed spontaneously in the middle of that ecstatic set.

Noge is coming back this year. So is that friend, this time with her whole family in tow.

“So, yeah,” Maddava says, smiling, “there’s a real draw here, even for people who don’t define themselves as jazz fans.”

Hey Nonny Women’s Jazz Festival, Jan. 4-7 at Hey Nonny, 10 South Vail Ave., Arlington Heights, unless specified. Four-day passes $120 at heynonny.com

• Yoko Noge’s Jazz Me Blues, 4-6 p.m. Jan. 4, tickets $1
• Sitarsys & Joan Hickey Quartet featuring Alexa Tarantino, 7:30-9:30 p.m. Jan. 4, tickets $15-$48
• Mary Halm Project & Emily Kuhn’s Helios Project, 4-6 p.m. Jan. 5, tickets $1
• Marlene Rosenberg Quintet & Natalies Wood (tribute to Rashaan Roland Kirk), 7:30-9:30 p.m. Jan. 5, tickets $15-$48
• Alexander/McLean Project & Affinity Trio featuring Pamela York, 4-6 p.m. Jan. 6, tickets $1
• Heirloom & Eunoia Society, 7:30-9:30 p.m. Jan. 6, tickets $15-$48
• Meghan Stagl and Friends, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Jan. 7, free with brunch purchase
• Alexis Lombre & Mary Halvorson’s Amaryllis Project, 3-5 p.m. Jan. 7 at Metropolis Theatre, 111 W. Campbell Rd., Arlington Heights, tickets $10-$60

Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.

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