Jack Wilkins Quintet
Performing live in the corner at Little Jumbo, 241 Broadway, Five Points, Asheville. No cover. Pull up a seat.
Admission no cover · ever
Jack Wilkins writes music the way a field geologist keeps a notebook. His records are named for the ground that made them. The Blue and Green Project grew out of the culture and color of the Blue Ridge. The Banff Project and The Rundle Sessions came from a Fulbright year at the University of Calgary and residencies at the Banff Centre in the Canadian Rockies. Acadian Rhythms came from his term as composer in residence at Acadia National Park, on the granite coast of Maine. One album is simply called Ridge Lines. The tenor saxophone carries all of it, a big, broad-shouldered sound that has led his University of South Florida ensembles, where he has directed jazz studies since the 1990s, to Montreux and the North Sea Jazz Festival.
This Monday brings him back toward the mountains he started from. Wilkins came up playing around Greensboro and finished his degree at Appalachian State in Boone, where Andy Page has now taught jazz guitar for more than two decades. Andy and his twin brother Zack, on acoustic and electric bass, have shared the bandstand with Wilkins before, and Justin Watt, who toured the U.S., Japan, and Canada with the Glenn Miller Orchestra before settling in Asheville in 2008, holds the time beneath them. Rick Simerly crosses the state line from East Tennessee with his trombone. He played on Acadian Rhythms, and his path runs through the bands of Woody Herman and Nelson Riddle and the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra under David Baker, the same David Baker that Wilkins went to Indiana University to study with decades ago.
Tenor and trombone side by side make a wide, warm sound, the two-horn voicing Wilkins tipped his hat to on Acadian Rhythms with a nod to the Jazz Crusaders. Expect his originals, drawn from those places, alongside standards stretched to fit the room. The creature in the corner has never seen the Rockies, and this may be as close as it gets. Like every night in the Little Jumbo series, the music is free with no cover, and seating is first come, first served.
Jack Wilkins transforms tenor saxophone into a compass for musical exploration, his horn pointing toward everything from the Canadian Rockies to the Appalachian ridgelines, from Swedish jazz clubs to Grammy-nominated orchestral suites. As Director of Jazz Studies at the University of South Florida, Wilkins has built a career on proving that the most compelling music happens when you're brave enough to let geography shape your sound—whether that's drawing inspiration from Banff Centre artist residencies or channeling American roots music through Blue Ridge mountain culture.
His seven albums as a leader read like a musical atlas: "The Rundle Sessions" and "The Banff Project" capture the expansive beauty of the Canadian Rockies, while "The Blue and Green Project" mines the soul of Appalachian tradition. Wilkins doesn't just play jazz—he composes landscapes, whether collaborating with Swedish legends like Jon Allan or serving as featured soloist on Chuck Owen's Grammy-nominated "River Runs: A Concerto for Jazz Guitar, Saxophone and Orchestra."
This Yamaha clinician and Fulbright Scholar understands that great jazz education and great jazz performance aren't separate activities—they're two sides of the same creative exploration. His USF Jazztet has graced stages from Montreux to North Sea Jazz festivals, proving that Wilkins' approach to music-making creates artists who can hold their own on any international stage. In his hands, the tenor saxophone becomes both teacher and student, always seeking that next musical horizon.
Justin Watt embodies the rare breed of drummer who's equally at home anchoring a world-famous big band or exploring intimate trio conversations in Asheville's vibrant jazz scene. This Ohio native transformed childhood percussion lessons into a musical passport that took him from Kent State and Youngstown State master's programs to a two-year stint behind the kit with the legendary Glenn Miller Orchestra, touring stages across the United States, Japan, and Canada.
Since settling in Asheville in 2008, Watt has become the Blue Ridge's go-to rhythmic architect, performing regularly with the Keith Davis, "Like Mind," and "Asheville Art" Trios—all groups dedicated to advancing the art of jazz trio playing. He's also the backbone for the Greenville Jazz Collective Quintet and frequently performs with the Asheville Jazz Orchestra, proving his versatility across ensemble sizes and styles.
Beyond the jazz clubs, Watt has shared stages with notable artists like Jim McNeely, Joey De Francesco, Bobby Shew, and Jimmy Heath, while also bringing his rhythmic expertise to regional theater productions. As an educator at UNC Asheville, Furman University, and the Asheville Music School, he passes on the fundamentals that built his own career—proving that the best drummers don't just keep time, they create the foundation that allows musical magic to flourish.
Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Andy Page has become a cornerstone of Boone's vibrant music scene as a senior lecturer of jazz guitar at Appalachian State University's Hayes School of Music. For over two decades, this versatile virtuoso has woven his guitar strings through the fabric of the High Country's musical landscape, transforming local venues into stages of sonic storytelling. Together with his twin brother Zack, Andy has been known to arrive at open jams and parties, captivating audiences with their deep groove and seemingly endless musical creativity. His fingers dance across fretboards with equal fluency in jazz, rock, and original compositions, while his academic pursuits span from the History of Rock Music to Heavy Metal Culture. A true musical nomad, Andy has carried his craft from the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland to Japan's Muroran Jazz Cruise, and through jazz workshops in Germany. Yet he chose to plant his roots in the mountains of North Carolina, where he continues to nurture the next generation of musicians while maintaining his own creative flame through groups like The Page Brothers Trio and Swing Guitars—a testament to an artist who found his perfect harmony between teaching and performing in the shadow of the Appalachians.
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.
The trombone is a difficult instrument to make singular. Its history is long, its voice immediately recognizable, and the shadow of J.J. Johnson falls across every serious player who has picked it up in the last seventy years. Rick Simerly does not avoid that shadow — he has studied it, absorbed it, and arrived somewhere entirely his own.
David Baker, leader of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, has called Simerly "one of the most exciting and consistently creative trombonists in jazz today." Jamey Aebersold has described him as "an astounding player with fantastic range and a keen sense of developing a solo — his playing takes you on musical journeys, and each one is different and exciting." The late J.J. Johnson, upon hearing Simerly's solo debut, offered a response that says everything: "It is quite impressive. You should be proud."
Simerly has played in the bands of Tommy Dorsey, Woody Herman, Nelson Riddle, Les Elgart, Bob Crosby, Jimmy Dorsey, Buddy Morrow, and the last band of Charlie Spivak. He has performed alongside Billy Taylor, James Moody, Slide Hampton, Jon Faddis, Eric Alexander, and Bobby Watson, and has toured with Frank Sinatra Jr., Lou Rawls, Gladys Knight, the Temptations, the Four Tops, and the Commodores. His recordings on the Double-Time Jazz label feature some of the most celebrated names in contemporary jazz. He is a veteran faculty member of the Jamey Aebersold Summer Jazz Workshops, a clinician for Conn-Selmer, and an Associate Professor of Music at Milligan University in Tennessee.
What drives him is not legacy or accolade but something simpler and more demanding. "Jazz is a challenging genre that gives you the freedom to put your personal stamp on the music," Simerly has said. "Improvisation allows me to actually create the music and interpret it in my own personal way. It's challenging and dictates a necessity to continually practice and improve. In jazz, mastery of your instrument is only the starting point."