Jack Wilkins has spent his career turning landscapes into music. Not metaphorically — literally. As a composer-in-residence at the Banff Centre in the Canadian Rockies, he wrote pieces shaped by glacial ridgelines and the particular silence of high altitude. At Acadia National Park in Maine, he composed a suite inspired by the procession of cars climbing Cadillac Mountain at sunrise and the rhythms of the Atlantic against granite. In the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where he grew up in Greensboro listening to his older brothers play Maceo Parker and Jr. Walker records, he created The Blue and Green Project — a recording that braided Appalachian roots music with jazz and R&B, incorporating the sound of a blacksmith's anvil from a shop in Spruce Pine. Seven albums as a leader. A Fulbright Scholar appointment at the University of Calgary. Artist residencies in Sweden and Appalachia and along the coast of Maine. Featured soloist on Chuck Owen's River Runs and Whispers on the Wind, both Grammy Award finalists. Thirty-plus years directing Jazz Studies at the University of South Florida, where his USF Jazztet has played Montreux, North Sea, Vienne, and Umbria and toured South Africa. JazzTimes once noted that despite his academic credentials, there is nothing academic about his playing — that what sets him apart is his emotional directness, his ability to swing from the heels up.
He keeps coming back to North Carolina. Every Christmas he returns to Greensboro to play with Piedmont Songbag. The mountains pull at him. And tonight they've pulled him to Little Jumbo, where he's leading a quintet built from musicians who understand what it means to let a place get inside your sound.
Rick Simerly joins on trombone, and his presence here expands everything. David Baker has called Simerly "one of the most exciting and consistently creative trombonists in jazz today," Hickory Record and the late J.J. Johnson, upon hearing his playing, said simply: "It is quite impressive. You should be proud." Hickory Record Simerly has performed alongside Billy Taylor, James Moody, Slide Hampton, Jon Faddis, and Bobby Watson, and toured with Frank Sinatra Jr., Lou Rawls, Gladys Knight, and the Temptations. Aamearts Two horns sharing a small room — Wilkins' tenor mapping the terrain, Simerly's trombone sounding out its depths — is the kind of front line that doesn't require explanation once it starts playing.
Andy Page holds the guitar chair. Senior lecturer of jazz guitar at Appalachian State's Hayes School of Music for more than two decades, Andy is Zack Page's identical twin — the one who got the guitar when their father handed out instruments on Christmas morning. He has carried that guitar from the Montreux Jazz Festival to Japan's Muroran Jazz Cruise to German jazz workshops, but chose to plant himself in Boone, where the Blue Ridge informs everything he plays.
Zack Page is on bass. The twin who got the four-string inheritance, Zack has played thousands of performances since the mid-1990s — a career that runs from Billy Higgins and Delfeayo Marsalis in New York to co-founding Asheville's gypsy jazz ensemble One Leg Up to anchoring sessions with Jeff Sipe. He graduated summa cum laude from UNC Wilmington, played Montreux while still in college, and has spent the decades since proving his father's theory that every good band needs a good bass man. Putting the Page twins on the same stage with Wilkins and Simerly means four musicians with deep North Carolina roots and decades of shared musical geography — Appalachian State, UNC system, the same mountain air moving through different instruments.
Justin Watt holds down the drums. Born in Ravenna, Ohio, trained at Kent State and Youngstown State with teachers from the Cleveland Orchestra and the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra, Watt spent two years touring with the Glenn Miller Orchestra across the United States, Japan, and Canada before settling in Asheville in 2008. He has since become one of the region's most in-demand drummers, anchoring the Keith Davis, Like Mind, and Asheville Art trios, performing with the Asheville Jazz Orchestra, and co-curating the Asheville Original Music Series. He teaches at UNC Asheville, Furman, and the Asheville Music School.
This is a quintet of educators who never stopped being players, of players who never let teaching calcify their instincts. Wilkins brings the landscape — the ridgelines, the national parks, the mountain music of his childhood. Simerly brings the slide horn's full weight of tradition, carried lightly and played with fire. The Pages bring the family frequency, the twin telepathy, the accumulated weight of thousands of gigs. Watt brings the Ohio precision tempered by seventeen years of Asheville's anything-goes ethos. Little Jumbo's curated Monday series brings the room — small enough that every note lands somewhere, dark enough that the creature in the corner can listen without being disturbed. This one's free.
Featuring
Jack Wilkins transforms tenor saxophone into a compass for musical exploration, his horn pointing toward everything from the Canadian Rockies to the Appalachian ridgelines, from Swedish jazz clubs to Grammy-nominated orchestral suites. As Director of Jazz Studies at the University of South Florida, Wilkins has built a career on proving that the most compelling music happens when you're brave enough to let geography shape your sound—whether that's drawing inspiration from Banff Centre artist...
The trombone is a difficult instrument to make singular. Its history is long, its voice immediately recognizable, and the shadow of J.J. Johnson falls across every serious player who has picked it up in the last seventy years. Rick Simerly does not avoid that shadow — he has studied it, absorbed it, and arrived somewhere entirely his own.
David Baker, leader of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, has called Simerly "one of the most exciting and consistently creative trombonists in...
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...
Justin Watt embodies the rare breed of drummer who's equally at home anchoring a world-famous big band or exploring intimate trio conversations in Asheville's vibrant jazz scene. This Ohio native transformed childhood percussion lessons into a musical passport that took him from Kent State and Youngstown State master's programs to a two-year stint behind the kit with the legendary Glenn Miller Orchestra, touring stages across the United States, Japan, and Canada.
Since settling in...
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....