Upcoming Events

In 1957, Prestige put four tenor saxophonists in a room and pressed record. Jack Wilkins borrows the premise for a Monday night at Little Jumbo, bringing his own tenor into conversation with Dylan Hannan while a rhythm section quietly threatens to steal the whole evening. Wilkins has carried his saxophone from the Canadian Rockies to Swedish stages to Grammy-nominated orchestral sessions, and Hannan brings the particular attentiveness of someone who studied composition and never quite stopped thinking that way. Two tenors in dialogue tend to sharpen each other, the phrasing trading off until something unexpected surfaces.

Alan Hall has spent four decades asking questions that drums answer differently every night. On Wednesday he brings his Exploritoreum to Little Jumbo, assembling four collaborators whose individual paths — through Cologne jazz clubs, university concert halls, eighteen states and a handful of Canadian provinces, the gravitational architecture of upright bass — converge into something that resists any single tradition's claim on it. Bill Bares approaches the piano the way a political theorist approaches a primary source. Tim Fischer exists where doctoral precision and street-level instinct stop arguing and start listening. Dylan Hannan's saxophone carries the memory of a middle school revelation that never quite resolved into certainty, which is exactly the point.

Brian Felix has spent decades building a musical life that moves between continents, traditions, and textures — from the Fillmore to Aberdeen, from jazz-rock to the classroom where he teaches improvisation and the Beatles with equal seriousness. Now rooted in Asheville, he brings the organ trio format somewhere new. The Brian Felix Organ Trio draws from gospel weight, samba motion, surf shimmer, reggae drift, and ambient space, holding it all together through something harder to name than genre: a shared listening that Tim Fischer and Evan Martin have made second nature. Their 2025 record Level Up landed an All About Jazz song of the day and earned praise for being genuinely eclectic without being scattered. That same quality shows up live, where the music has room to shift and surprise.

Four musicians walk into Little Jumbo and the creature in the corner leans forward. Will Boyd, Zack Page, Jay Sanders, and Alan Hall have spent years learning to dissolve the walls between what music is supposed to be and what it wants to become. Sanders draws lines on the guitar that feel like questions mid-air. Boyd breathes through reeds the way a room holds a secret. Page roots the whole thing in something low and necessary, a frequency you feel before you understand it. Hall keeps time the way planets do — not metronomically, but with intention and mass. Together they move through composed passages and open space, through melody and noise, through stillness and the kind of momentum that builds its own architecture. Nothing here is performed at you.

Four musicians arrive at Little Jumbo on May 25th without the safety net of harmonic instruments — no piano, no guitar, no pre-answered questions. Jacob Rodriguez's saxophone, Justin Ray's trumpet, Quinn Sternberg's bass, and Joe Enright's drums will navigate each other the way you navigate a room after the lights go out: slowly, carefully, with total attention. Rodriguez has moved between stadium stages and New York's underground long enough to know what a note actually weighs when nothing is cushioning its landing. Ray brings the hard-won understanding that space does more work than sound. Sternberg, now rooted in Asheville after years in New Orleans and the Midwest, holds the gravitational center on four strings.

Four musicians walk into a bar on a Tuesday and build something that wasn't there before. Sanders, Boyd, Page, and Hall are collections of stellar debris who have found each other in this particular corner of the cosmos, and what they do together resists easy description. Sanders bends melody through a prism no one else can see, his guitar carrying frequencies from Sharrock to Hartford and out into unmarked territory. Boyd's reeds and winds are rooted in the red clay churches of South Carolina, now traveling dimensions his EWI opens like airlock doors. Page is the gravitational center, the low-end mass that keeps the whole system coherent.

Five musicians walk into a room and something shifts. Evan Martin, Justin Ray, Bill Bares, Zack Page, and Jacob Rodriguez play together as The Core, and that name carries weight — not as a brand but as a philosophy. These five have found what most ensembles spend years searching for: the place where individual voices stop competing and start listening so deeply that the music seems to arrive from somewhere outside any one of them. Standards become confessions here. Silence becomes as intentional as sound. There is no grandstanding, no moment where technique announces itself ahead of feeling. What you get instead is five people who have learned that showing up fully, every phrase, is the hardest and most honest thing a musician can do.

Four musicians walk into a room and something older than genre takes over. Jay Sanders, Will Boyd, Zack Page, and Alan Hall have spent enough time in the deep water of improvisation to know when to stop swimming and simply float. Sanders pulls sounds from his guitar that feel less composed than discovered. Boyd's reeds move like breath made visible. Page holds the low end not as a foundation but as a gravity, something you feel before you understand it. Hall keeps time the way certain dreams keep time, which is to say not strictly, but truthfully. Their original compositions shift between stillness and momentum, between melody you could hum and sound you could only describe as weather.

Jeff Sipe has spent decades learning how rhythm thinks. Quinn Sternberg knows what bass can hold when you let it breathe. Jay Sanders builds things with six strings that don't quite have names yet. Together as the Blingus Trio, they arrive at Little Jumbo not with a setlist but with a shared willingness to find out what happens next. Sipe's drumming operates somewhere between architecture and weather — precise and unpredictable at once. Sternberg's bass doesn't just anchor; it narrates, asks questions, occasionally answers them. Sanders pulls from jazz, from orchestral thinking, from places that resist easy categorization.

Brian Felix has been navigating the space between structure and surprise for a long time, and the organ trio he leads with guitarist Tim Fischer and drummer Evan Martin is one of the more honest expressions of where that navigation has taken him. The Hammond sits at the center of a sound that draws from gospel, samba, reggae, surf, and ambient drift without announcing any of them too loudly. Their 2025 record Level Up landed an All About Jazz Song of the Day, which feels right for music this comfortable in its own skin. Felix came up through the San Francisco jazz-rock scene, shared stages with Charlie Hunter and Joshua Redman, and crossed an ocean to play Aberdeen.