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Brad Walker spent three years not playing saxophone. He was teaching math in Brooklyn, sitting in the Village Vanguard audience every night, watching players he might have been standing beside. Then he moved to New Orleans and the city did what it does — absorbed him slowly, completely, until he became one of the most sought-after saxophonists there, leading Sturgill Simpson's horn section on the Grammys and SNL, releasing seven albums, earning DownBeat's four-star attention. His most recent record, A Sliver of Catharsis, belongs to a musician who has stopped trying to prove anything. Tenor and alto saxophone move through electronic effects, compositions that reach toward stillness and spiritual searching, a band that functions as a single breathing thing.

Jay Sanders, Zack Page, and Alan Hall arrive as the Empyrean Trio, a name they've earned rather than borrowed. Sanders draws lines on the guitar that seem to originate somewhere just outside the room, Page holds the low end like a gravitational fact, and Hall builds the kind of rhythmic architecture that makes you reconsider where the floor is. Together they move through original compositions that don't announce their destinations in advance, letting improvisation do what it does best — reveal something that wasn't there a moment ago. The music passes through jazz, blues, and rock without settling into any of them, using those territories as launching points rather than homes. Little Jumbo's particular strangeness suits them well.

Five musicians who have no business being this good together walk through the door every Monday and prove that they belong. Evan Martin came to drums after years as a guitarist and still listens like one, tracking phrases and responding to shape rather than just keeping time. Zack Page has played 275 gigs a year since the mid-nineties, crossed every ocean, anchored styles that have no shared name, and builds a floor here so solid that everyone else can afford to be brave.

Four musicians walk into a room and something older than genre takes over. Will Boyd breathes through his reeds like he's translating a language that predates words. Jay Sanders finds frequencies on guitar that feel less played than summoned. Zack Page holds the low end with the patience of someone who understands that foundation is its own kind of wisdom. Alan Hall keeps time the way rivers keep moving — purposeful, inevitable, alive to what surrounds them. Together these four have spent years learning to dissolve the walls between composition and pure invention, between structure and wandering, between what a piece is supposed to be and what it wants to become in the room.

Casey Driessen has spent twenty-five years taking a fiddle to places it was never supposed to go and finding out it was welcome everywhere. Twenty-two countries. A year wandering through Spain, Ireland, Scotland, India, Japan, and Finland with his family, recording with local musicians in whatever room or field offered itself. A one-man looping show called The Singularity. A notation system for percussive bowing he helped develop and then gave away so fiddlers everywhere could share a common language. And always, the red shoes. His Sunday Bazaar residency is a market laid out across one evening, the five-string fiddle looped into architecture that can move from Appalachian to raga to Nordic folk within a single piece, no two nights the same because that is the whole point.

The bassoon is the oldest voice in the room. Not Rick Dilling, who has spent fifty years woven into the musical fabric of these mountains. Not Steve Davidowski, who was cutting records with the Dixie Dregs before most of the cocktail menu's ingredients existed. Not Zack Page, who has averaged 275 gigs a year for three decades and still counting. The bassoon itself carries the memory of court music and cathedral acoustics and the low rumble of orchestral pits through centuries of continuous use, and Michael Rabinowitz — the only musician in jazz history to build an entire career improvising on it — is the one who taught it to speak this particular language.

Four musicians walk into a room carrying decades between them, and something that did not exist before begins to exist. That is the simplest way to describe what Sanders, Boyd, Page, and Hall do together, and it barely scratches the surface. Jay Sanders bends guitar melody through angles borrowed from everywhere and belonging nowhere obvious. Will Boyd's reeds and winds carry frequencies rooted in South Carolina red clay, now traveling through dimensions his EWI opens like doors into uncharted rooms. Zack Page — a man who has logged somewhere around 275 gigs a year since the mid-nineties — provides the gravitational center, the low mass that holds the whole orbiting system together.

Jack Wilkins has spent his career letting geography write the music. Glacial ridgelines in the Canadian Rockies, granite coastline in Maine, the Blue Ridge he grew up inside in Greensboro listening to Maceo Parker records — these are not metaphors for him. They are source material. Seven albums as a leader, a Fulbright appointment, Grammy-nominated work with Chuck Owen, and thirty-plus years directing Jazz Studies at USF have never made his playing institutional. JazzTimes put it plainly: he swings from the heels up. Tonight he leads a quartet assembled from deep North Carolina roots. Andy Page holds the guitar chair, a senior lecturer at Appalachian State for more than two decades, a musician who planted himself in Boone and let the mountains stay in his sound.

Will Boyd, Zack Page, Jay Sanders, and Alan Hall have been finding that place together for long enough that the search itself has become the destination. Boyd's reeds breathe through it, Sanders' guitar pulls threads from somewhere just out of reach, Page holds the low frequency that everything else orbits around, and Hall marks time the way time actually moves — not metronomically, but with intention. Their compositions shift without warning between stillness and density, between melody you could hum on the walk home and sound that asks you to let go of the need to name what you're hearing. This is a quartet that has earned the right to go anywhere, because they've done the work of learning where anything actually is.

Brian Felix has been moving through music for a long time — San Francisco stages, Scottish festival halls, rooms where improvisation was the only map. Now he anchors himself in Asheville, teaching the next generation how sound thinks, and leading an organ trio that treats the tradition not as a ceiling but as a floor. Felix, guitarist Tim Fischer, and drummer Evan Martin have developed the kind of listening that does not need to be announced. Their 2025 record Level Up, all original compositions, landed an All About Jazz Song of the Day and reminded people that organ-based music still has places left to go. Special guest Jacob Rodriguez joins them tonight, adding another voice to a conversation that was already moving fast.

Every atom in your body was forged inside a dying star. The calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood, the carbon threading through your DNA — all of it cooked at temperatures beyond human language, scattered across the void, and reassembled over billions of years into something that walks into a bar on a Tuesday and listens. Sanders, Boyd, Page, and Hall are four arrangements of stellar debris who have chosen to spend their brief window of consciousness building original music together in real time. Jay Sanders refracts melody through a prism of everything from Sharrock to Hartford, bending light no one else can see. Will Boyd carries frequencies rooted in South Carolina red clay, now orbiting through dimensions his EWI opens like airlock doors.

Casey Driessen sets up his stall on the third Sunday of every month, and what he brings to the table shifts each time. A fiddle in his hands becomes something stranger and more expansive than a fiddle has any right to be — looped back on itself, layered into something architectural, then dissolved before you can name what it was. The Sunday Bazaar is exactly what it sounds like: a market of sound where the inventory changes and nothing is priced the same twice. You might arrive expecting one thing and leave having heard three others. The walls here already hold their share of mysteries, and Driessen fits right in among them, adding his own to the collection. Come with an open hand and see what you walk out holding.