The Steve LaSpina New Music Ensemble
Performing live in the corner at Little Jumbo, 241 Broadway, Five Points, Asheville. No cover. Pull up a seat.
Admission no cover · ever
Steve LaSpina learned the bass from his father in Wichita Falls, Texas, and had to wait until he was tall enough to reach the top of the upright. His father and grandfather both played in dance bands. The son carried that inheritance to Chicago, where he was working professionally by fifteen, and then to New York, where he has spent more than forty years in the company of jazz history. Marian McPartland heard him early. Benny Carter built his last working rhythm section around him after a single rehearsal. Jim Hall kept him in his trio for years, and anyone who knows Hall's playing knows what that partnership asked of a bassist: patience, space, and a sense of time that never had to announce itself.
That history matters on this particular Monday, because LaSpina arrives with two guitarists. Tim Fischer, Coastal Carolina professor and co-author of Jazz Guitar Duets, and Matt Dingledine, Professor of Jazz Guitar at Furman and co-founder of the Greenville Jazz Collective, will share the harmonic ground a piano usually holds, while Asheville's Ryan Ptasnik, whose drums have traveled as far as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, keeps the floor steady beneath them. The music is LaSpina's own. He has recorded more than seventy-five original compositions as a leader and written for string quartet besides. His albums carry titles like Eclipse, The Clouds, and A Change in the Weather, and the writing earns that sky-watching vocabulary: airy, lyrical, attentive to the way light shifts across a long afternoon.
Born in the dance band DNA of Wichita Falls, Texas, Steve LaSpina transformed family musical heritage into a New York City bass legacy that spans four decades and reads like a who's who of jazz history. From Chicago's South Side clubs to Manhattan's most prestigious stages, LaSpina's upright and electric bass have provided the rhythmic backbone for legends including Stan Getz, Jim Hall, Mel Lewis, and Chet Baker. This is bass playing as musical archaeology, where every walking line connects present moments to past masters, where each note choice reflects decades of studying with giants like Ray Brown while forging his own path through the modern jazz landscape. LaSpina doesn't just play bass—he translates the entire history of American music into four-string conversations, proving that the best rhythm section players aren't just timekeepers, they're time travelers who can make any room feel like it's connected to every jazz club that ever mattered.
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 Carolina University, Fischer has built a career on proving that the most interesting music happens at the intersection of seemingly incompatible styles. His collaboration with Brian Felix on 'Level Up' and his co-authorship of 'Jazz Guitar Duets' demonstrate a musician who understands that teaching and performing aren't separate activities—they're two sides of the same creative coin, each informing the other in an endless cycle of musical discovery.
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.
Matt is a music educator, guitarist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist in Greenville, South Carolina. He is Professor of Jazz Guitar and Director of Jazz Combos at Furman University since 2019. He is the owner of Music on Mitchell where he has been teaching lessons for guitar, bass, mandolin, banjo, ukulele, lap steel, and music theory since 2006.
He is the Board President and Co-Founder of the Greenville Jazz Collective (GJC and GVL Jazz), voted multiple times as Best Jazz Band of the Upstate by the readers of the Greenville News. He is a member of the Hot Club of Greenville, Contemporary Quintet, Latin-pop group Phat Lip, and has played with Joel Frahm, Steve LaSpina, Melissa Aldana, Georgia Heers, Christie Dashiel, Wallace Roney, Jason Marsalis, Justin Stanton, Chris Vadala, Bob Moses, Jeff Sipe, the Greenville Symphony Orchestra, Spartanburg Philharmonic, the Brevard Music Center Orchestra, and for dozens of touring Broadway companies including MJ the Musical, The Wiz, 9 to 5, and Back to the Future.
As an advocate and volunteer for music education and jazz, Matt has been the head of the Education Committee for the Greenville Jazz Collective and the JazzEd Ensemble which has performed over 100 school visits since 2014 for tens of thousands of Upstate students. Since its inception in 2012, Dingledine has helped the GJC to raise over $500,000 for jazz, music education, and performance purposes in the Upstate. He has coordinated jazz events for many area arts and cultural organizations such as The Peace Center, the Greenville County Museum of Art, the Greenville County Library, Upstate International, The Pleasantburg Rotary Club, the Children's Museum of the Upstate, and the Fine Arts Center.
Dingledine's compositions for small group have been featured by the GJC, the Asheville Original Music Series, and the Asheville Composer's Concert. Matt is a graduate of the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami, the Fine Arts Center of Greenville, and Christ Church Episcopal School.