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.

Ryan Ptasnik honed his drumming skills in Pinedale High School band classes in Wyoming, a foundation that would eventually carry him from garage bands to performing at the Opera and Ballet Theatre in Shymkent, Kazakhstan. This jazz-trained drummer has become a versatile force in multiple musical worlds, from his work with the experimental group Moyindau—where he performed Kazakh poetry settings at the base of Pik Lenin in southern Kyrgyzstan on a stage constructed from two pickup trucks—to anchoring the Asheville-based Grateful Dead tribute band Clouds of Delusion. Ptasnik's musical journey includes traveling to Central Asia with pianist Alex Kreger, where they presented music in Tajikistan with Norwegian saxophonist Mette Henriette, and recording with Moyindau—a group that blended jazz with arrangements of popular and folk tunes from Macedonia and Tajikistan. Now based in Asheville, he maintains an active presence supporting local artists like Whitney Monge and Rick Cooper at venues like Highland Brewing, while also serving as the rhythmic backbone for Batdorf & The Brother Wolf. From Wyoming band rooms to makeshift mountain stages in Kyrgyzstan to Asheville's vibrant music scene, Ptasnik proves that the best drummers don't just keep time—they become the adaptable foundation that allows wildly diverse musical visions to flourish, whether channeling Jerry Garcia's spirit or bringing Kazakh poetry to life through rhythm.

Some cats talk about paying dues. Keith Davis bought the whole building. Forty years moving through the jazz continuum—from the polished brass lineage of the **Glenn Miller** and **Artie Shaw Orchestras** to the sweat-soaked blues authenticity of **Matt "Guitar" Murphy** (yes, *those* Blues Brothers). He's traded phrases with **David "Fathead" Newman**, **Donald Byrd**, **Wallace Roney**, **Javon Jackson**, and a constellation of giants whose names read like a syllabus for an advanced degree in swing. He sharpened his blade at **Berklee**, studied with the incomparable **Jerry Bergonzi**, then ascended to the mountain—literally—at the **1985 Banff Jazz Workshop**, absorbing transmissions from **Dave Liebman**, **Dave Holland**, **John Abercrombie**, and the high priest of the avant-garde himself, **Cecil Taylor**. In 2017, the **Coastal Jazz Hall of Fame** made it official. But Keith already knew who he was. Now operating from Greenville, SC, teaching the next generation at **Furman University**, leading his trio, and—in a twist that speaks to his pursuit of balance in all things—practicing and teaching **Hunyuan Chen Style Taiji**. The hands that voice those chords? They also know the forms. The stillness between notes? Cultivated.

keithdavismusic.com

It started with his mother's ear. *"I'd wanted to play an instrument, but I didn't know which one I was going to pick. My mom said, 'I like saxophone.'"* And just like that, Florence, South Carolina sent another voice into the continuum. Peter Dimery didn't just pick up the tenor—he picked up the *weight* of it. The lineage. The responsibility. He emerged from **Furman University** with technique and training, but the real education came through obsession: two albums that rewired his musical DNA. ***Blue Train. Giant Steps.*** **John Coltrane** became the map and the territory. The question and the answer. The thing he was grasping for before he knew what grasping meant. What came out the other side? A tenor man in the old sense—big sound, soulful phrasing, the kind of tone that fills a room before the first phrase resolves. He moves through contemporary classical, soul, and jazz like they're dialects of the same mother tongue. Because they are. A cornerstone of **The Wheel Sessions**—that underground jazz series in West Greenville where the real ones gather—Peter has spent years building the Upstate's sonic vocabulary alongside conspirators like Phillip Howe, Shannon Hoover, and Kevin Korschgen. Now he's bringing that Florence-to-Furman-to-the-future energy to the Zack Page Euphemism, where his horn speaks the things we only imply.