The Will Boyd Project

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.

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, Berklee, and the New England Conservatory, he transforms every performance into a master class where bebop meets book learning, where chord changes become cultural commentary. His scholarly articles in American Music and Jazz Research Journal prove that the deepest musical truths emerge when academic rigor meets artistic passion, making every Little Jumbo appearance a reminder that jazz isn't just entertainment—it's American intellectual history told in real time through eighty-eight keys.

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.

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 generations before Alan was born. He just happened to pick the instrument that does it most directly.

He started formal lessons in fifth grade, where a band teacher named Chuck Heller — a bassoonist, of all things — told him he had talent. That was the first door. The second was a ninth-grade teacher named Tony Nigro who started hiring him for professional gigs and featuring him in concerts. The third was a San Jose Mexican-American party band called Los Unicos, which put Hall on a professional bandstand at thirteen years old. By seventeen he had won the Percussive Arts Society's eight-state drum set competition, beating out drummers who would go on to their own significant careers. The judge was Carmen Appice, a rock drummer who had no particular reason to reward a kid playing jazz, but who praised the musicality and called it refreshing. Hall still remembers that.

He went to Berklee College of Music expecting to study with Alan Dawson, the legendary drummer and educator whose teaching had shaped a generation of players. Dawson was already gone. Hall spent two and a half years at Berklee, studying with Bill Norine on drums and briefly with Ed Saindon on vibes, then left and found Dawson teaching privately from his home. For two years, Hall worked through Dawson's program — the Ritual, the rudiments memorized over months until the warm-up became a twenty-five-minute meditation, the tunes played with Dawson on vibes while Hall soloed through forms with weird structures designed to test his memory and his ears. Dawson was formal. He was encouraging but never flattering. He didn't let things slide. And he modeled something Hall carried for the rest of his career: a life where the teaching and the playing existed in balance, where excellence was its own project, where the craft was serious enough to spend a lifetime refining. That standard of excellence, Hall has said, had a very strong impression on him.

In 1986, Hall joined the Berklee percussion faculty. He taught there for seven years, confronting students from around the world who could do things he couldn't — and discovering that his job was to find the holes in what they could do and help fill them. It was at Berklee that he noticed something that would define his contribution to drum education: students could read through Dawson's exercises, could execute the patterns on the page, but when Hall closed the book and asked them to improvise with the material, they couldn't. The language wasn't in their bodies. It was in their eyes. That gap — between reading and internalizing — became the seed of his book Internalization: A Non-Reading Intensive Approach Toward Mastery of the Jazz Drumming Language, which he spent years developing and finally published in 2005. It is a method for getting the vocabulary of jazz drumming off the page and into the muscles and the mind, and it is used by teachers and students who may never know the story of its origin in a Berklee practice room where a young professor watched a brilliant student play every note correctly and miss the point entirely.

Then he left. He walked away from a faculty position at one of the most prestigious music schools in the world, moved back to the Bay Area, and delivered cookies for a year. No teaching job lined up. No gig waiting. Just the knowledge that the regularity of the academic calendar was slowly suffocating something he needed to keep alive. Word got out. Dave Eshelman's Jazz Garden big band brought him in. The late pianist Smith Dobson started calling. Art Lande hired him whenever he came through town. He recorded at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, at the Record Plant in Sausalito. He played with Paul McCandless from Oregon, with Russell Ferrante of the Yellowjackets, with pianists Taylor Eigsti and Geoffrey Keezer and Ed Simon, with Lee Konitz. He worked Cirque du Soleil at Madison Square Garden and Teatro Zinzanni in San Francisco and the national tour of Wicked. He became one of the Bay Area's first-call drummers — the person you hire when the music requires someone who can navigate anything and make everyone in the room sound like the best version of themselves.

Twenty years into that California life, he started composing. Ratatet — a sextet featuring bassoon, trombone, and vibraphone on the front line — was born in 2014 out of Hall's realization that his musical ideas needed more harmonic architecture than any trio could provide. The debut album Arctic, released on Ridgeway Records in 2016, was named one of the top ten Bay Area jazz releases by the San Jose Mercury News. Several of its compositions were inspired by visual artists — Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin — because Hall is also a painter and photographer whose work hangs in private collections on both coasts. Music and visual art function as what he calls positive feedback loops: two different modes of expression that keep amplifying each other. Heroes, Saints and Clowns followed in 2018, a response to political turmoil rendered in seven sonic portraits of the people who inspired, empowered, or infuriated him.

Hall now lives in Weaverville, just north of Asheville. He teaches at the Jim Beaver School of Music and maintains his position at the California Jazz Conservatory remotely. He founded the Asheville Jazz Collective and plays Tuesday nights at Little Jumbo with Jay Sanders, Will Boyd, and Zack Page in a quartet that treats every set as an act of mutual discovery. He has been a professional drummer for more than forty-five years and a teacher for more than forty of those, which means he has spent nearly half a century doing two things simultaneously: refining his own craft to the highest standard he can reach, and helping other people find the language they didn't know was already inside them. The kid who put on concerts for the neighborhood never stopped believing that music is meant to be shared. He just got better at it.