The house in Orangeburg, South Carolina, was a frequency spectrum unto itself. The Isley Brothers and the Manhattan Transfer and Dolly Parton and Mozart — all of it moving through the same rooms, all of it landing in the ears of a kid from Queens, New York, who had been transplanted to the Lowcountry and was trying to figure out which signal to lock onto. His mother had graduated from Jamaica High School of the Performing Arts, and she made sure Will and his siblings sang. Gospel was the foundation — Yolanda Adams, the Clark Sisters — but Aretha Franklin and James Brown and Prince were never far from the turntable. Then one day he watched Gerald Albright's video on a Johnny Gill single, and the saxophone chose him the way weather chooses a landscape: completely, irreversibly, with no interest in negotiation. Boyd was playing in professional R&B bands before he turned eighteen. He enrolled at South Carolina State University, where the jazz ensemble's alumni roll reads like a dispatch from the center of American music — Houston Person, Ron Westray from Lincoln Center, Charlton Singleton of Ranky Tanky, baritone man Johnny Williams from the Count Basie Orchestra. He marched in the Marching 101. He earned a BA in Music Business. He was inducted into the university's jazz hall of fame in 1997. And he met Kelle Jolly, a vocalist and music educator who would become his wife, his musical partner, and eventually the host of WUOT's *Jazz Jam* radio show and the founder of the Knoxville Women in Jazz Jam Festival. They married at a jazz festival in Japan, which tells you everything you need to know about how music and life operate in the Boyd household. After Columbia, South Carolina — where he worked the fusion and funk circuit alongside drummer John Blackwell, who would go on to play for Prince, and trombonist Fred Wesley, the architect of James Brown's horn sound — a chance encounter with saxophonist Patrick Langham pulled Boyd to Knoxville. He enrolled in the University of Tennessee's jazz studies program and found himself studying under three musicians who represented entirely different philosophies of what a horn can do: Jerry Coker, the legendary educator whose Woody Herman credentials and pedagogical texts had shaped generations of improvisers; Zim Ngqawana, the South African free jazz visionary; and Donald Brown, the pianist and composer who had held down the keys in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. Coker later called Boyd a modern musician steeped in tradition, which is about as precise a six-word summary as anyone has managed. Brown became Boyd's producer, guiding three albums — *Live at the Red Piano Lounge*, *Freedom Soul Jazz*, and *Soulful Noise* — that document a musician whose soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, bass clarinet, and flute all serve the same central impulse: soul. Not soul as a genre but soul as a method, the conviction that technique without feeling is expensive noise and that the deepest jazz has always kept one foot in the church. His *Freedom Soul Jazz* took the spirituals — "Go Down Moses," "Every Time I Feel the Spirit," "We Shall Overcome" — and gave them the harmonic weight of modern jazz without stripping them of their original devotional power. He played the premiere of *Shadow Light*, an opera celebrating the life of painter Beauford Delaney, with the Marble City Opera. He appeared on the PBS documentary soundtrack for the same painter. He joined the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra. He and Kelle toured Japan multiple times, performed on cruise ships, appeared on national television, staged musical theater productions, and were honored with the MLK Award for the Arts. In 2021, the City of Knoxville proclaimed July 21st "Kelle Jolly and Will Boyd Day." Along the way, the list of musicians who have called on Boyd grew into something that looks less like a résumé and more like a map of modern American music: Leslie Odom Jr., Doc Severinsen, Wycliffe Gordon, Regina Carter, Jeff Coffin, the Four Tops, John Beasley's Monk'estra, the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra, the Harry James big band. He has appeared on recordings with Nicholas Payton, Chris Potter, Jeremy Pelt, Eric Reed, Russell Gunn. He played Big Ears in Knoxville and Peter Barakan's It's Magic in Tokyo. He added the EWI — the electronic wind instrument — to his arsenal, not as a replacement for the acoustic horns but as an extension of them, another voice in a conversation that keeps expanding. Boyd now teaches at UNC Asheville and Warren Wilson College, directs the Contemporary Jazz Ensemble of Asheville, and performs weekly at Little Jumbo in the Jay Sanders Quartet. He carries multiple instruments to every gig the way some people carry multiple languages — not to show range but because each one says something the others can't. The soprano sax, which he has called the most difficult and sweetest of the reeds, remains the one closest to his center. It is the voice that sounds most like the house in Orangeburg: every frequency at once, all of it moving through the same room, all of it landing exactly where it needs to.

willboydonsax.com

From Nebraska to Harvard to Little Jumbo, Dr. Bill Bares embodies the scholarly soul of jazz—a NEH Distinguished Professor whose academic credentials from Amherst College read like a jazz education manifesto written in political science and piano poetry. When a lip injury ended his All-American trumpet dreams, Bares discovered that sometimes life's detours lead to destinations you never knew you were seeking. Now directing jazz studies at UNC Asheville after teaching stints at Harvard, Brown, Berklee, and the New England Conservatory, he transforms every performance into a master class where bebop meets book learning, where chord changes become cultural commentary. His scholarly articles in American Music and Jazz Research Journal prove that the deepest musical truths emerge when academic rigor meets artistic passion, making every Little Jumbo appearance a reminder that jazz isn't just entertainment—it's American intellectual history told in real time through eighty-eight keys.

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.

quinnsternbergmusic.com

When you grow up in a household where your father is jazz visionary pianist Donald Brown and your brother Keith is also a pianist, you have two choices: find a different career or claim the one instrument nobody else in the family is playing. Kenneth Brown chose drums at age four, then spent the next few years studying piano "to gain a harmonic foundation"—which is Brown family code for "if you're going to be a drummer, you better understand what everyone else is doing harmonically or Dad will notice." By fourteen, Brown was already a working musician, and by the time he reached adulthood, he'd appeared on recordings with Ravi Coltrane, Wallace Roney, Kenny Garrett, and Roy Hargrove—the kind of résumé that makes other drummers question their life choices. His debut album *3 Down* channels the roaring energy of Art Blakey, the polyrhythmic complexity of Elvin Jones, and the compositional sophistication that comes from growing up in a house where dinner table conversation probably involved discussions of harmonic substitutions and rhythmic displacement. Now based in Knoxville, Brown splits his time between education, composition, and leading projects that blur the lines between jazz, funk, R&B, blues, and rock—because when you've performed with David "Fathead" Newman, Curtis Fuller, Steve Nelson, Warren Wolf, and Greg Tardy, genre distinctions start feeling like arbitrary suggestions rather than rules. His drumming doesn't just keep time—it tells stories, builds architecture, and occasionally reminds everyone in the room that being a working musician at fourteen wasn't just precociousness, it was preparation for a lifetime of making every bandstand feel like a conversation between past masters and future possibilities.

Alex Bradley's trumpet delivers "soulful sounds" that bridge New Orleans second-line swagger with Asheville's mountain-town eclecticism, proving that the best brass players don't just play notes—they tell stories with every phrase, every articulation, every moment the bell points skyward. As a core member of Empire Strikes Brass since the band's 2012 formation, Bradley has helped transform what started as a group of friends playing New Orleans-inspired funk into a collective of seriously talented musicians whose albums *Theme For A Celebration* and *Brassterpiece Theatre* (both recorded at Echo Mountain) have earned WNCW radio acclaim and festival circuit credibility. His horn has graced stages at Red Rocks (with Shpongle Live Band and Papadosio), shared bills with Umphrey's McGee, and contributed to a sound that seamlessly blends brass-band tradition with rock energy and jam-band sensibilities. When Bradley's not laying down horn arrangements with Empire Strikes Brass, he brings his "soulful trumpet sounds" to Electro Lust—an Electronic Latin Funk project featuring Grammy-winning artists and members of Yo Mama's Big Fat Booty Band and The Fritz, where live beats meet brass and multicultural influences collide in ways that make you forget whether you're in Miami, Brazil, or Cuba. This is trumpet playing that understands groove isn't just about rhythm—it's about creating spaces where melody becomes movement, where horn lines become conversations, and where every performance proves that Asheville's music scene thrives because players like Bradley know how to honor tradition while pushing it somewhere new.