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.

jazzdrumming.com

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.

Quinn Sternberg doesn't just play bass—he becomes the gravitational center around which musical solar systems orbit, his four strings serving as the invisible force that holds melody and rhythm in perfect harmonic balance. In Asheville's intimate jazz venues, Sternberg has mastered the art of musical architecture, building rhythmic foundations so sturdy that horn players can stretch toward the stratosphere while drummers explore the outer reaches of syncopation. His upright bass doesn't merely walk—it tells stories with every step, each note choice revealing decades of deep listening to masters like Ray Brown and Ron Carter while forging his own path through the modern jazz landscape. This is bass playing as conversation rather than accompaniment, where Sternberg's melodic sensibilities transform traditional rhythm section roles into something more akin to chamber music, proving that the most profound musical statements often come from the spaces between the obvious beats, where subtlety meets groove and creates something that makes everyone else in the room sound better.

quinnsternbergmusic.com

Christian Howes treats the violin like a conversation starter rather than a statement piece. He's as comfortable teaching in a high school orchestra room as he is on stage, and has spent years figuring out how to help string players speak jazz, blues, and whatever else wants to come out. Through his nonprofit Creative Strings, he's created hundreds of free lessons that prove you don't need a pedigree to improvise—just curiosity and a willingness to sound weird for a while. He plays like someone who believes the instrument has more to say than we've let it.

christianhowes.com