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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 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.

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.

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 ...

There is a sound that listeners learn to recognize and cannot quite explain. It crosses whatever instrument Will Boyd has in his hands on a given night, saxophone or flute or clarinet or EWI, arriving each time with the same unmistakable signature. Technique without feeling, in Boyd's world, is expensive noise. He grew up in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in a house where the Isley Brothers, Dolly Parton, and Mozart all moved through the same rooms, and that breadth never left him. He studied under Jerry Coker, Zim Ngqawana, and Donald Brown, three musicians representing entirely different philosophies of what a horn could do. Coker eventually called him a modern musician steeped in tradition, and no one has improved on that description since.

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 the corner of the room where the light gets strange and something watches from the wall. Jay Sanders, Will Boyd, Zack Page, and Alan Hall have been listening to each other long enough that the listening itself has become a kind of language. Sanders pulls something through the guitar that sounds like it was already there, waiting. Boyd's reeds move the air in ways that feel older than the song. Page holds the low end like a hand on a shoulder. Hall finds the pulse beneath the pulse. Together they move through composed melody, open improvisation, quiet Americana, and whatever lies past the edge of that — not because they planned to but because that is where the conversation goes. What happens in this room on this night will not happen again exactly this way.

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.

Twin brothers, four minutes and forty years apart in the same breath. Andy and Zack Page grew up inside music rather than arriving at it, shaped by a household where blues and heavy metal and old-time singing occupied the same air, where deep listening was the curriculum long before either of them stood in a classroom to teach it. Andy holds a chair at Appalachian State, where he teaches jazz guitar alongside the history of rock and metal, because to him it has always been one long unbroken human conversation. He has played Montreux, toured Japan, performed for Maya Angelou. Zack has taken his bass to all fifty states and across the Caribbean, Australia, South America, Europe, and the Far East, and has recorded alongside Billy Higgins, Delfeayo Marsalis, and Babik Reinhardt, Django's son.

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. Building something in real time from attention, instinct, and decades of accumulated craft. Sanders refracts melody through a prism that bends light no one else can see.

Two instruments walk into a room carrying centuries between them. The saxophone, invented in the 1840s, was always a little strange, a hybrid thing that did not quite belong to any existing family. The kalimba predates it by a long stretch, its voice built into the structure of African music at a foundational level. Will Boyd has spent his life in conversation with the saxophone's soul tradition, the lineage of Eddie Harris and Johnny Hodges, while extending that conversation into electronic territory through the EWI, an instrument that opens new rooms inside the ones he already knows.

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 percussion have spent enough years in the practice of improvisation that the usual signposts dissolve early. What remains is something harder to name — original compositions that drift from structured melodic themes into open territory and back again, passing through soul, Americana, traditional jazz, and occasionally into pure sound for its own sake. The creature in the corner has seen a lot of Tuesday nights, but a quartet this attuned to the spaces between notes tends to get its attention. Nothing is performed here so much as discovered in real time, each instrument finding its role as the music itself decides what it wants to become.