Past Events

Dive into the sonic waves of Quinn Sternberg's Mind Beach—where jazz becomes a landscape and every note washes over you like tide meeting shore. This isn't your typical Monday night. It's an expedition into the spaces between beats, where four master musicians construct entire worlds from reed, string, skin, and ivory. Quinn Sternberg's bass serves as your anchor, holding gravity steady while Jacob Rodriguez's baritone sax paints horizons in deep indigo. Joe Enright's drums pulse like the ...

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.

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.

Four musicians walk into a room and something older than genre takes over. Jay Sanders on guitar, Will Boyd on reeds, Zack Page on bass, and Alan Hall on drums have spent enough time in the deep end of improvisation to know what lives down there. Their original compositions don't pick a lane so much as they render the concept of lanes temporarily meaningless — a melodic thread surfaces, a groove opens beneath it, then everything dissolves into something freer and stranger before reassembling into form again. Whatever the creature in the corner is looking at, it's probably this. Little Jumbo welcomes Sanders, Boyd, Page and Hall on Tuesday, March 24th. Free to attend, and that's the whole deal.

Jack Wilkins has spent his career letting places write music through him — glaciers in the Canadian Rockies, Atlantic granite along the Maine coast, the Blue Ridge where he grew up hearing Maceo Parker and Jr. Walker through his brothers' bedroom walls. The Blue and Green Project braided Appalachian roots with jazz and R&B, and somewhere in its grooves you can hear a blacksmith's anvil from Spruce Pine. Tonight he leads a quintet assembled from musicians who share his geography. Rick Simerly brings a trombone tradition that J.J. Johnson once called quite impressive — high praise offered simply. Andy and Zack Page are twins who received their instruments on the same Christmas morning and have been in harmonic conversation ever since.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Four people walk into a bar carrying decades of accumulated attention and set about building something that has never existed before. Jay Sanders bends guitar melody through angles borrowed from no one tradition in particular — his lines refract like light through a prism nobody ground to spec. Will Boyd's reeds and winds carry the red clay memory of South Carolina churches while his EWI opens frequencies into dimensions those churches never mapped. Zack Page, who has averaged 275 gigs a year since the mid-nineties, provides the gravitational low-end mass that keeps everything from flying apart into the dark.

Justin Ray has played Madison Square Garden and the Sydney Opera House, and on Monday he walks into Little Jumbo, where the art doesn't quite make sense and something in the corner is always watching. What changes is the instrument behind him. A piano leaves silence between its notes and a trumpet floats there. A Hammond B3 never stops breathing, and the horn has to push through a living harmonic field, has to earn its place in the room. Brian Felix came to the organ through the piano, studied with Kenny Barron at Rutgers, co-led a jazz-rock group that toured nationally for years, earned a doctorate exploring the moment rock becomes jazz, and landed at UNC Asheville, where that question continues to get answered through drawbars and a rotating Leslie.

Every atom in your body was forged in the belly of a dying star. The calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood, the carbon threading through every strand of 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 night and listens. Sanders, Boyd, Page & Hall are four collections of stellar debris who have chosen to spend their brief window of consciousness making original music together. Not playing songs. Not running repertoire. Building something in real time from the raw material of attention, instinct, and decades of accumulated craft. Sanders' guitar refracts melody through a prism of everything from Sharrock to Hartford.

There is a specific gravity to a room when someone who has played with Stan Getz and Chet Baker and Jim Hall and Benny Carter picks up a bass in the corner of a cocktail bar. Not reverence, exactly — something more like tidal pull. **Steve LaSpina** has spent four decades as one of New York's most quietly essential bassists, a musician whose note choices carry the compressed weight of every stage he's stood on since leaving the dance band tradition of Wichita Falls, Texas, for the South Side ...

Casey Driessen: Sunday Bazaar at Little Jumbo is a monthly residency on the 3rd Sunday where music spills out like treasures in a bustling market. Fiddle loops, wild grooves, sonic oddities, and vibrant rhythms mix together in a swirl of color and sound. Tease your tastebuds with expertly crafted cocktails and soak in the cozy, electric atmosphere. No two nights are alike—wander in, follow your ears, and see what you discover.

Forget dinner reservations and overpriced roses. This Valentine's Day, DJ Lil Meow Meow takes over Little Jumbo to spin the kind of beats that make strangers dance together and couples fall in love all over again. Whether you're celebrating with your sweetheart, your best friends, or your beautifully independent self, come shake it off and let the music do the talking. No wilting flowers, no awkward small talk over prix fixe menus—just good drinks, great company, and a dance floor that doesn'...

When a percussion philosopher assembles his laboratory of sound, the walls between rhythm and melody begin to dissolve. This is music as inquiry rather than statement—four sonic investigators treating Little Jumbo's intimate geometry as a place where questions sound better than answers. One arrives carrying four decades of conversations between drum heads and the spaces between continents, his sticks having traced rhythmic philosophies from Cologne jazz clubs to circus tent reveries, from ...

The Brian Felix Organ Trio is the jazz/funk organ group of the future. Rooted in the deep traditions of organ-driven jazz, funk, and soul, the trio blends reggae, samba, surf rock, gospel, and ambient soundscapes into a unified and forward-looking musical vision. Known for its telepathic interplay, deep grooves, and daring spontaneity, the trio has been captivating audiences throughout the southeastern United States. The group’s most recent release, Level Up (Slimtrim Records, 2025), a collec...

On Thursday, January 29th, Little Jumbo sheds its winter coat and slips into something a little more... tropical. The Tropilachia Club returns, transforming our cozy corner of Asheville into a sun-soaked escape where palm fronds sway against the frost outside and every sip carries a whisper of warmer days ahead. It's still the Little Jumbo you know and love—just wearing a lei and dreaming of spring. Join us as we trade snow for sand (metaphorically speaking) and raise a glass to brighter hori...

*"We don't say what we mean. We play what we imply. And we've been inverting the natural order since... right about now."* ~ Zack Page (Probably) In the chrome-plated lounges of tomorrow's yesterday, where neon hums at 440Hz and the cocktails pour themselves, four sonic cosmonauts have breached the atmospheric ceiling of conventional groove. **KEITH DAVIS** mans the control panel of 88 ivory switches, routing harmonic frequencies through dimensions yet unnamed. His fingers decode the me...