**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.

mindtonicmusic.com

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

Jeff Sipe transforms drum sets into portals between musical dimensions, his sticks serving as wands that conjure everything from jazz fusion precision to jam band euphoria. Born in Berlin but raised on American groove, this founding member of Aquarium Rescue Unit alongside Colonel Bruce Hampton helped create a musical language that fused jazz, fusion, bluegrass, rock, and avant-garde into something entirely unprecedented. Operating under the mystical moniker "Apt. Q-258," Sipe has become the drummer that makes other musicians' eyes light up—touring with everyone from Trey Anastasio and Warren Haynes to John McLaughlin and Leftover Salmon. As one musician put it, he's "regarded as one of the best drummers alive" yet remains "just a normal guy who lives down the street" and says yes to almost any musical invitation. Three Grammy nominations later, this Winchester Conservatory and Berklee-trained percussionist has mastered the art of making complex music sound effortless, whether commanding symphony orchestras in Warren Haynes' Jerry Garcia celebrations or exploring uncharted territory with his own Jeff Sipe Trio. Living in North Carolina's mountains, Sipe embodies what guitarist Jimmy Herring calls someone who "lives for music"—remaining his first choice among any drummer on the planet. In Sipe's hands, every beat becomes a conversation between tradition and innovation, proving that the most profound rhythmic statements come from drummers who understand that technique serves soul, not the other way around.

jeffsipemusic.com