Charlie Ballentine w/ Quinn Sternberg & Al Sergel

Charlie Ballantine plays guitar like someone who learned early that the instrument keeps a long memory. There's Wes Montgomery in there from his Indianapolis upbringing, Frisell and Scofield from his bebop conservatory years at Indiana University, Hendrix and Chet Atkins from his father's record stores, and a Telecaster running through a Deluxe Reverb that carries all of it into the room at once. Jazz, rock, folk, surf, country, blues, the angular geometry of Thelonious Monk, the wild mercury sound of Bob Dylan, the high lonesome reaches of American song. He moves between these as if the borders were never really there.

His catalog reflects that range. Twelve albums since 2014, including Vonnegut, Cold Coffee, Where Is My Mind?, a double album dedicated to the music of Monk, and Life Is Brief: The Music of Bob Dylan. All About Jazz named him one of the top 200 living guitarists. Jazziz placed him alongside Scofield, Frisell, and Julian Lage as a player who brings the harmonic seriousness of jazz to the tonal vocabulary of rock and roots music. Vintage Guitar described his world as one where jazz, rock, and folk coexist peacefully, which sounds simple until you try it.

Ballantine has a right hand that combines flatpick with middle and ring fingers, a Danny Gatton-adjacent approach he developed reconciling Chet Atkins and Merle Travis tunes from childhood with the Charlie Parker bebop heads he encountered in college. The technical fact matters because it's audible: his lines have a textural depth most jazz guitarists don't reach for, chord melodies and chromatic runs and singable phrases woven together into something that reads as one voice.

Born in Indianapolis, son of guitarist Scott Ballantine, Charlie spent over a decade as a pillar of the Indianapolis jazz community alongside his wife, saxophonist Amanda Gardier, before relocating east. He now teaches at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins and tours behind a body of work that keeps growing.

Quinn Sternberg doesn't just play bass—he becomes the gravitational center around which musical solar systems orbit, his four strings serving as the invisible force that holds melody and rhythm in perfect harmonic balance. In Asheville's intimate jazz venues, Sternberg has mastered the art of musical architecture, building rhythmic foundations so sturdy that horn players can stretch toward the stratosphere while drummers explore the outer reaches of syncopation. His upright bass doesn't merely walk—it tells stories with every step, each note choice revealing decades of deep listening to masters like Ray Brown and Ron Carter while forging his own path through the modern jazz landscape. This is bass playing as conversation rather than accompaniment, where Sternberg's melodic sensibilities transform traditional rhythm section roles into something more akin to chamber music, proving that the most profound musical statements often come from the spaces between the obvious beats, where subtlety meets groove and creates something that makes everyone else in the room sound better.

The first instrument Alfred Sergel IV ever touched was an 18-inch cymbal his father brought home from the band room. His dad was a band director — started in the schools, eventually landed at a college — and Al was the little kid walking next to the drumline, absorbing the pulse of organized sound before he had any language for what it was. The cymbal was surplus from the marching band, dented and heavy and probably not worth keeping, but it was enough. He hit it and the vibration traveled through his hands and into the rest of his life.

What came next was liner notes. Sergel got hold of a jazz record — the specifics matter less than the chain reaction — and started reading the credits. Art Blakey. Elvin Jones. Philly Joe Jones. Jo Jones. Ed Thigpen. Roy Haynes. He wrote down every name, took the list to the library, and began researching their discographies one by one. This is how a drummer builds a lineage in reverse: not through apprenticeship but through archaeology, digging backward through the catalog until the names become sounds and the sounds become a vocabulary. He studied percussion and jazz studies at Florida State, then spent a year at Berklee with John Ramsey, and by the time he emerged he had internalized enough history to move comfortably through nearly any musical situation he encountered — which turned out to be a wider range of situations than most drummers ever see.

Sergel's career has unfolded across territories that don't usually share a map. He joined the Chad Lawson Trio in 2000 and watched their single climb to number seven on the national jazz charts. He toured internationally with singer-songwriter Jason Upton, appearing on the BBC. He shared stages with Bob Mintzer, Jim Snidero, Marcus Printup, Nnenna Freelon, and Ricky Skaggs — names drawn from hard bop, straight-ahead, and deep country, often in the same season. He served as Worship Director at MorningStar Ministries, playing drums in sacred contexts where the music carries a different kind of weight. He sat in with Bernadette Peters, Joan Rivers, and Sir Tim Rice. He recorded with Grammy-winning bassist Tim Lefebvre, whose work with David Bowie represents exactly the kind of genre-dissolving ambition that Sergel's own playing has always pointed toward.

For years, Sergel carried song ideas around on his phone — voice memos recorded in late-night places after gigs, hummed melodies and rhythmic fragments captured before they evaporated. He thought of them as sketches, not compositions. Then a friend listened to a batch of them and asked a question that changed his trajectory: Why don't you think these are songs? That was the moment the Alfred Sergel IVtet was born — the name a sly fold of his generational numeral into a quartet designation, the band itself a vehicle for the music he'd been carrying in his pocket for years. Charlotte musicians Ron Brendle, Troy Conn, and Phil Howe joined him. The debut EP caught the attention of All About Jazz. His single "Y Closed" landed at NPR Music. Sleepless Journey hit number one on the NACC jazz charts. His compositions draw from Beck and Tycho as readily as from Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau — pop melodicism threaded through jazz architecture, the kind of music that makes sense when you've spent three decades crossing between sacred and secular, arena and club, the library and the bandstand.

Based in Charlotte and teaching at Davidson College and Central Piedmont, Sergel remains a working musician in the truest sense — someone for whom the gig is never just the gig but always a continuation of that first vibration, the one that traveled from a surplus marching cymbal through a kid's hands and into a life spent listening for what comes next.