Ghosts of the American Dream

Jay Sanders grew up in Nashville, which means he grew up understanding that music is labor — that behind every song on the radio is a session player who showed up on time, read the chart, and made someone else's vision real. But the Nashville that shaped Sanders wasn't the one on Broadway. It was the one in practice rooms and living rooms where Reggie Wooten talked about fundamental vibration and sacred geometry and the Music of the Spheres, where the instrument became a doorway into something older and stranger than the music business. Later, in Knoxville, Sanders spent extended time with Samurai Celestial, the former Sun Ra drummer, absorbing a cosmology in which sound is not entertainment but architecture — a way of organizing the invisible. These weren't lessons in technique. They were lessons in what music is for.

He moved to Asheville in 1996 and almost immediately began building. He co-founded the Snake Oil Medicine Show with Jason Krekel and Andy Pond — a band that has spent nearly three decades defying classification, equal parts rolling art party and persistent meditation on the nature of human connection. He joined Acoustic Syndicate in 1997, stepping into the bass chair alongside three members of the McMurry family and staying for a quarter century as the band became a foundational force in progressive acoustic music, playing Bonnaroo and Farm Aid and touring the country more times than anyone kept count. He played bass for Donna the Buffalo. He co-led the E.Normus Trio, whose debut drew All About Jazz comparisons to John Zorn's Naked City — fuzzed-out psycho guitar licks counterbalanced by softly woven innocence, the kind of music that refuses to stay in one room.

Along the way, he played with Ornette Coleman, Béla Fleck, Fred Wesley, Sam Bush, Bernie Worrell, Big Chief Monk Boudreaux, and Kirk Joseph. He composed for the ETHEL string quartet. He scored independent films. He studied with Jerry Coker and Jeff Sipe. He played guitar and bass across 47 states and six countries. And then, in 2024, he released Evanescent — his solo debut, seven original compositions and a tone poem dedicated to the Voyager spacecraft, performed by an eight-person ensemble featuring Justin Ray, Jacob Rodriguez, Casey Driessen, and other longtime Asheville collaborators. The German press called it a work of astonishing range. It is the sound of a musician who has spent decades absorbing everything and is finally letting it all speak at once.

When Hurricane Helene struck the mountains in 2025, Sanders responded the way a composer responds — he wrote Sinfonietta Helene, his first symphonic work, which premiered with the Blue Ridge Orchestra. The piece was shaped by collective grief and collective resilience, an offering made from the same impulse that has driven his entire career: the conviction that music exists not to decorate life but to help people survive it.

Sanders co-owns Little Jumbo, which USA Today named one of the Best Bars in America for 2025. He curates the Monday night jazz series that brings musicians from across the region into a room on Broadway Street where the art on the walls doesn't quite make sense and the listening is close. He leads a quartet every Tuesday with Will Boyd, Zack Page, and Alan Hall. He organized Asheville's inaugural Improvisational Music Festival and serves on the board of URSA Asheville, a non-profit dedicated to musical innovation. He is building a "Live at Little Jumbo" recording series. He is, in other words, doing exactly what he has always done — constructing rooms where music can happen, and then standing inside them with his guitar, making sure it does.

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.

In Asheville's Monday night jazz ecosystem, Evan Martin represents the rare breed of drummer who understands that sensitivity and power aren't opposites—they're dance partners. As a cornerstone of the local scene, Martin has mastered the art of musical telepathy, reading room dynamics and bandmate intentions with the precision of a master craftsman who knows exactly when to whisper and when to roar. His kit becomes a conversation partner rather than a time machine, responding to melodic phrases with percussive punctuation that feels both inevitable and surprising. This is drumming as collaborative art form, where every snare accent and hi-hat whisper serves the greater musical narrative, making Martin not just a timekeeper but a storyteller whose vocabulary happens to be built from wood, metal, and perfect timing.

The house in Orangeburg, South Carolina, was a frequency spectrum unto itself. The Isley Brothers and the Manhattan Transfer and Dolly Parton and Mozart — all of it moving through the same rooms, all of it landing in the ears of a kid from Queens, New York, who had been transplanted to the Lowcountry and was trying to figure out which signal to lock onto. His mother had graduated from Jamaica High School of the Performing Arts, and she made sure Will and his siblings sang. Gospel was the foundation — Yolanda Adams, the Clark Sisters — but Aretha Franklin and James Brown and Prince were never far from the turntable. Then one day he watched Gerald Albright's video on a Johnny Gill single, and the saxophone chose him the way weather chooses a landscape: completely, irreversibly, with no interest in negotiation.

Boyd was playing in professional R&B bands before he turned eighteen. He enrolled at South Carolina State University, where the jazz ensemble's alumni roll reads like a dispatch from the center of American music — Houston Person, Ron Westray from Lincoln Center, Charlton Singleton of Ranky Tanky, baritone man Johnny Williams from the Count Basie Orchestra. He marched in the Marching 101. He earned a BA in Music Business. He was inducted into the university's jazz hall of fame in 1997. And he met Kelle Jolly, a vocalist and music educator who would become his wife, his musical partner, and eventually the host of WUOT's Jazz Jam radio show and the founder of the Knoxville Women in Jazz Jam Festival. They married at a jazz festival in Japan, which tells you everything you need to know about how music and life operate in the Boyd household.

After Columbia, South Carolina — where he worked the fusion and funk circuit alongside drummer John Blackwell, who would go on to play for Prince, and trombonist Fred Wesley, the architect of James Brown's horn sound — a chance encounter with saxophonist Patrick Langham pulled Boyd to Knoxville. He enrolled in the University of Tennessee's jazz studies program and found himself studying under three musicians who represented entirely different philosophies of what a horn can do: Jerry Coker, the legendary educator whose Woody Herman credentials and pedagogical texts had shaped generations of improvisers; Zim Ngqawana, the South African free jazz visionary; and Donald Brown, the pianist and composer who had held down the keys in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. Coker later called Boyd a modern musician steeped in tradition, which is about as precise a six-word summary as anyone has managed.

Brown became Boyd's producer, guiding three albums — Live at the Red Piano Lounge, Freedom Soul Jazz, and Soulful Noise — that document a musician whose soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, bass clarinet, and flute all serve the same central impulse: soul. Not soul as a genre but soul as a method, the conviction that technique without feeling is expensive noise and that the deepest jazz has always kept one foot in the church. His Freedom Soul Jazz took the spirituals — "Go Down Moses," "Every Time I Feel the Spirit," "We Shall Overcome" — and gave them the harmonic weight of modern jazz without stripping them of their original devotional power. He played the premiere of Shadow Light, an opera celebrating the life of painter Beauford Delaney, with the Marble City Opera. He appeared on the PBS documentary soundtrack for the same painter. He joined the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra. He and Kelle toured Japan multiple times, performed on cruise ships, appeared on national television, staged musical theater productions, and were honored with the MLK Award for the Arts. In 2021, the City of Knoxville proclaimed July 21st "Kelle Jolly and Will Boyd Day."

Along the way, the list of musicians who have called on Boyd grew into something that looks less like a résumé and more like a map of modern American music: Leslie Odom Jr., Doc Severinsen, Wycliffe Gordon, Regina Carter, Jeff Coffin, the Four Tops, John Beasley's Monk'estra, the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra, the Harry James big band. He has appeared on recordings with Nicholas Payton, Chris Potter, Jeremy Pelt, Eric Reed, Russell Gunn. He played Big Ears in Knoxville and Peter Barakan's It's Magic in Tokyo. He added the EWI — the electronic wind instrument — to his arsenal, not as a replacement for the acoustic horns but as an extension of them, another voice in a conversation that keeps expanding.

Boyd now teaches at UNC Asheville and Warren Wilson College, directs the Contemporary Jazz Ensemble of Asheville, and performs weekly at Little Jumbo in the Jay Sanders Quartet. He carries multiple instruments to every gig the way some people carry multiple languages — not to show range but because each one says something the others can't. The soprano sax, which he has called the most difficult and sweetest of the reeds, remains the one closest to his center. It is the voice that sounds most like the house in Orangeburg: every frequency at once, all of it moving through the same room, all of it landing exactly where it needs to.

Some instruments speak in fixed points. The pedal steel lives in the spaces between them. A bar slides where a fret would stop, a foot tilts a pedal, and a single note becomes a slow migration, never quite landing, always arriving. Matt Smith has spent more than twenty years inside that motion, drawing long, unhurried lines out of an instrument most people only notice once it has already moved them. In his hands the steel is less an instrument than an atmosphere, something that fills a room from the edges in.

He is, by trade and by temperament, a connective presence. Across two decades and hundreds of recordings he has been the harmonic undertow in other people's songs, a longtime voice in Amanda Anne Platt and The Honeycutters and in the Amy Ray Band, a multi-instrumentalist whose name surfaces in the credits of records all across this region. He is also a curator in his own right; the weekly series he hosts across town began as a simple instinct to gather musicians he admires in one place and see what the night decides to become. That generosity, the impulse to build a room and then listen to it, is the same thing you hear when he plays.

There is something fitting about the curator stepping into a room curated for him. Little Jumbo's series runs every week and is always free, and it rewards exactly the kind of attention Matt's playing asks for: the long tone that hangs a beat longer than you expect, the bend that leans toward something just out of reach. Sit close enough and the steel becomes the whole weather of the place, the creature in the corner included, watching the note drift the way the rest of us do.