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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.

Jeff Sipe has long understood that drums are portals, a knowing shaped by years alongside Colonel Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit into something that moves between precision and the untranslatable. Quinn Sternberg's bass holds the gravitational field steady while melody and time spiral outward. Jay Sanders builds sonic architecture from effects and intention, a Nashville-trained player who chose instead to become a cosmologist, mapping the territories between silence and sound. Together as the Blingus Trio, they converge at Little Jumbo not to impose a vision but to dissolve the conditions that make imposition possible.

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.