The Page Brothers

On their twelfth Christmas, Pete Page gave one son a guitar and the other a bass. The old man loved Booker T. & the M.G.'s and worshipped Duck Dunn, and he had a theory that every good band needs a good bass man. He wasn't wrong. Andy got the guitar. Zack — four minutes younger, identical in face, opposite in instrument — got the bass. Their mother came from the McGhees of Pilot Mountain, North Carolina, a family whose old-time music roots run back generations through the Appalachian soil. Their grandfather used to drive Pete up from small-town Carolina to Philadelphia and New York to hear Miles Davis and Horace Silver. The whole household was a frequency map: church choirs, blues records, hard rock bleeding through bedroom walls, a father pointing out bass lines on Ray Brown albums the way other dads pointed out constellations. Black Sabbath coexisted with the Mingus Big Band. It all went in.

Zack started on electric bass at eleven. He didn't touch an upright until he arrived at UNC Wilmington in 1991, where he begrudgingly agreed to major in Music and then graduated summa cum laude. While there, the university's jazz combo was invited to the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland — the kind of experience that recalibrates everything a young player thinks is possible. After Wilmington came Los Angeles, then New York City, where he absorbed the relentless focus and the relaxed intensity that defines the best session environments. Theater companies, cruise ships, jazz clubs, studio dates — the work took him to all fifty states, the Caribbean, Australia, South America, Europe, and the Far East. He played with Billy Higgins, one of the most recorded drummers in the history of jazz. He played with Delfeayo Marsalis, Cyrus Chestnut, Marvin Stamm, and Eddie Daniels. He recorded with Babik Reinhardt, the son of Django — a connection that would come to shape one of his longest-running projects.

Then he came home. Not to New Jersey, where he'd grown up, but to the mountains his mother's family had known for centuries. Andy had already settled in Boone, teaching jazz guitar at Appalachian State. Zack landed in Asheville and became the bassist everyone calls. Not the one who waits for the right project — the one who says yes because every musical situation is worth inhabiting fully, a lesson New York burned into him. He co-founded One Leg Up, Asheville's gypsy jazz ensemble, channeling his Babik Reinhardt connection and his love of Django's Hot Club into a string-swing outfit that has been a fixture of the regional scene since 2003. With Andy, he launched the Page Brothers — twin brothers leading a rotating cast through gypsy swing, straight-ahead, fusion, and, on occasion, extreme black metal, because the kids from Rock Road never fully outgrew Iron Maiden. Their album A to Z, recorded at Ticknock Studio in Lenoir, documents the particular telepathy that comes from sharing a womb and thirty-plus years of bandstands.

Page averages roughly 275 gigs a year. That number has held steady since the mid-1990s, which means the man has played somewhere in the neighborhood of eight thousand performances — a body of work that exists almost entirely in the memories of the people who were in the room. He teaches at UNC Asheville. He anchors sessions at Landslide Studio alongside Jeff Sipe. He holds down the low end for folk-rock storytellers and hard bop blowouts with equal commitment. Trumpeter Justin Ray once observed that Page has the hallmark of every great musician: he makes everyone around him better. That's the Duck Dunn principle, passed from a father's record collection to a twelve-year-old's Christmas present to a career spent proving, night after night, that the old man's theory was right all along.

Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Andy Page has become a cornerstone of Boone's vibrant music scene as a senior lecturer of jazz guitar at Appalachian State University's Hayes School of Music. For over two decades, this versatile virtuoso has woven his guitar strings through the fabric of the High Country's musical landscape, transforming local venues into stages of sonic storytelling. Together with his twin brother Zack, Andy has been known to arrive at open jams and parties, captivating audiences with their deep groove and seemingly endless musical creativity. His fingers dance across fretboards with equal fluency in jazz, rock, and original compositions, while his academic pursuits span from the History of Rock Music to Heavy Metal Culture. A true musical nomad, Andy has carried his craft from the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland to Japan's Muroran Jazz Cruise, and through jazz workshops in Germany. Yet he chose to plant his roots in the mountains of North Carolina, where he continues to nurture the next generation of musicians while maintaining his own creative flame through groups like The Page Brothers Trio and Swing Guitars—a testament to an artist who found his perfect harmony between teaching and performing in the shadow of the Appalachians.

Rick Dilling drove from Pennsylvania to the mountains of North Carolina in the summer of 1973 to play golf. He thought he wanted to be a teaching pro. That first week in Boone, a jazz pianist hired him for a gig, and he never went back home. More than fifty years later, he is still in these mountains, still playing, still the person every bandleader in western North Carolina calls first.

The origin story matters because it tells you something essential about how Dilling operates — he follows the sound. He grew up listening to his father's records without knowing the names on them: Miles Davis, the Modern Jazz Quartet, JJ Johnson, Dave Brubeck. He loved the Tijuana Brass. He loved Basie and Ellington and Goodman and Woody Herman. Then, at twelve, a drum teacher handed him a Buddy Rich album, and the entire instrument opened up. Later it was Tony Williams, Grady Tate, Ed Thigpen, Joe Morello, Mel Lewis — each one revealing a different dimension of what a drummer could be inside the music rather than on top of it. He enrolled at Appalachian State University, graduated with a degree in Music Industry Studies, and then spent the next thirty-eight years on the jazz faculty there, teaching applied drum set to generations of students — including Shirazette Tinnin, who went on to lead her own band in New York City and credits Dilling with helping her get her first kit.

The list of people who have trusted Dilling behind them reads like a survey course in American jazz: Clark Terry, Herb Ellis, Phil Woods, Ernie Watts, Houston Person, Joe Temperley, Billy Taylor, Tony Monaco. He played with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra and the Nelson Riddle Orchestra. At the Brevard Music Center, he shared a stage with Louie Bellson — set up his drums right beside the legendary drummer's kit, played the first half of the concert, then watched Bellson play the second. When the crowd demanded an encore, Bellson called Dilling back out for a drum battle on "In a Mellow Tone." Bellson could have buried him. He didn't. That's the kind of respect Dilling's playing earns.

Saxophonist Todd Wright calls him "Mr. Tasty" — a nickname that captures something technical language can't quite reach. Dilling listens. He supports. He does what the music needs before anyone has to ask. Vocalist Wendy Hayes put it more precisely: he is there for the music first, not for himself, and that selflessness is what elevates him from player to artist. In Asheville, where he has been based since 2011, he is the drummer for the Asheville Jazz Orchestra — where he now serves as Artistic Director — as well as the Michael Jefry Stevens Trio, the Richard Shulman Group, the Todd Wright Quartet, and the Wendy Jones Quartet. He leads his own big band, Time Check, a tribute to the music of Buddy Rich that brings the full-throated roar of a seventeen-piece ensemble to stages that rarely get to feel that kind of air displacement.

Dilling is the kind of musician a city builds a jazz scene around without always realizing it. He's on the bandstand five nights a week, anchoring sessions at the White Horse in Black Mountain, at Highland Brewing, at Biltmore Estate, at every room that takes the music seriously. He has shaped the sound of this region not just through performance but through decades of teaching — sending students out into the world with the understanding that swing is not a style but a commitment, and that the drummer's job is to make everyone else sound like the best version of themselves.

Some saxophonists arrive on a bandstand announcing themselves. Ben Colvin is the other kind. A fixture of the Asheville scene for years, he has built a playing identity on something quieter and more durable: taste, a beautiful tone, and an instinct for where the tune actually wants to go. Ask any rhythm section in town who they'd call first for a horn chair and his name comes up early.

The Ben Colvin Quartet is his working band, a unit built around the deep pocket of Joe Enright on drums, Quinn Sternberg on bass, and Alex Taub at the keys. Their book moves fluently between '60s Blue Note soul jazz — Wayne Shorter, Hank Mobley, that whole sanctified corner of the catalog — and more contemporary voices like Roy Hargrove and Ben Wendel, with originals threaded through and Afro-Cuban and funk pulses keeping the rhythm section honest. It is jazz played the way it was meant to be played: listening first, conversation second, solos as a natural consequence of both.

Ben also holds the saxophone chair in Queen Bee and the Honeylovers, the Asheville swing outfit that has won the Mountain Xpress Best of Jazz vote every year since 2019, and turns up across the city's broader ecosystem of gigs, sessions, and one-night collaborations. He is the kind of player you hear once and then start noticing everywhere, which is how most good saxophonists seem to happen.

This performance is part of Little Jumbo's curated music series and is free to attend.