Jay Sanders & Ryan Ptasnik Trio

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.

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.