Alan Hall's Exploritoreum
When a percussion philosopher assembles his laboratory of sound, the walls between rhythm and melody begin to dissolve. This is music as inquiry rather than statement—five sonic investigators treating Little Jumbo's intimate geometry as a place where questions sound better than answers.
One arrives carrying four decades of conversations between drum heads and the spaces between continents, his sticks having traced rhythmic philosophies from Cologne jazz clubs to circus tent reveries. Another channels bebop through the lens of political science, his eighty-eight keys reminding us that jazz has always been intellectual discourse disguised as groove. A third exists in that rarified space where USC doctoral precision meets street-level groove, where European touring experience fuses with American jazz DNA. The fourth transforms reed instruments into musical passports, his saxophone carrying stories from middle school revelations to concert halls across eighteen states and four Canadian provinces. And the fifth brings the gravitational architecture of four strings, building invisible foundations sturdy enough to let everyone else float.
This isn't a band playing repertoire—it's an ensemble treating the stage like a petri dish where grooves breathe, textures mutate, and curiosity compounds into something that couldn't exist in any single musical tradition. European improvisation meets Appalachian immediacy. Scholarly rigor meets street-level spontaneity. In a room where proximity breeds revelation and every frequency finds its frequency-responder, prepare for an evening where rhythm becomes hypothesis, melody becomes evidence, and five veteran explorers prove that after decades of making music, the most exciting sound is still the one you haven't heard yet.
Featuring
Before Alan Hall played his first drum lesson, he played concerts. He and his sister would turn on the radio and perform for the neighborhood kids in San Jose — no instruments, no training, just the instinct that sound was meant to be shared and that sharing it required an audience. His mother was a pianist who sang and taught. His grandparents were Spanish dancers on the vaudeville circuit. His father's father wrote pop songs. The family had been in the business of moving people's bodies for...
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,...
Dr. Tim Fischer exists in that rarified space where USC doctoral precision meets street-level groove, where European touring experience fuses with American jazz DNA to create something entirely his own. This guitarist-composer-educator doesn't just play jazz fusion—he reimagines what happens when classical technique meets electronic experimentation, when rock energy collides with bebop sophistication. From Los Angeles studios to St. Louis classrooms to his current faculty position at Coastal...
Dylan Hannan transforms reed instruments into musical passports, his saxophone, clarinet, and flute carrying stories from middle school jazz band revelations to concert halls across 18 states and four Canadian provinces. This east coast Florida native discovered his calling in a school jazz ensemble, then spent his University of Central Florida years expanding his musical vocabulary—mastering jazz studies while secretly studying theory and composition on piano, proving that the best wind...
Josef Butts arrived in Asheville from the New Orleans music scene, carrying the harmonic language of the Gulf Coast into the mountain region. A musician with formal credentials—MM and BA in music, with DMA studies underway—who has taught bass at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, he belongs to a lineage of bassists who understand improvisation as architecture, each note positioned within a structure that can hold both freedom and intention.
Outside his day work in the technology...
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