In ancient cosmology, the Empyrean was the highest heaven—a realm of pure fire and light where celestial beings dwelled beyond the planetary spheres, untouched by earthly corruption or temporal decay. It's the perfect name for three musicians who long ago abandoned ground-level groove for something that operates in the stratosphere of sonic exploration.

This isn't fusion. Fusion implies things that were separate. This is music that never acknowledged the boundaries in the first place—music from the highest heaven, where all sounds exist simultaneously in a state of pure potential, waiting for the right combination of strings, sticks, and celestial alignment to make them audible to earthbound listeners.

Jay Sanders doesn't just play music—he uses it as a star map, plotting courses through harmonic nebulae that haven't been discovered by conventional jazz cartographers. His conversations with entities from the music of the spheres aren't metaphorical. He's been there. He's mapped the territory. He knows which chord voicings open wormholes and which melodic contours can bend spacetime just enough to make listeners forget which dimension they're occupying.

Zack Page doesn't walk—he levitates, transcending physical properties, becoming a conduit for gravitational forces that hold entire musical solar systems in orbit. He carries dual citizenship in heavy metal's molten core and jazz's outer atmosphere, forging sonic highways that connect the subterranean to the celestial, the doom riff to the bebop line, all while making it sound inevitable.

Alan Hall propulsion systems—not for traveling through space, but for creating space itself. He doesn't just keep time; he manufactures it, stretches it, compresses it, and occasionally makes it disappear entirely. Every idea is a small supernova, recalibrating local physics. He's the timekeeper for music that exists outside time.

Together, they create what one observer called "a canvas of like-minded sonic adventurers"—but that undersells it. This is architecture in four dimensions. This is what happens when three virtuosos decide that the atmospheric constraints of conventional jazz trio playing are just suggestions that can be ignored by anyone with sufficient escape velocity.

THE SECOND SET ANOMALY: GRAVITATIONAL ASSIST FROM RETURNING COSMONAUTS

Midway through the evening, the trio's orbital trajectory will be altered by the arrival of two musicians who've been traveling their own elliptical paths through the cosmos:

Jason Krekel—the polymorphous string alchemist who's spent decades proving that different acoustic voices are really just different tuning systems for the same cosmic frequency.

Andy Pond—the philosopher who has spent years learning that seemingly opposite musical traditions weren't opposing forces but complementary wavelengths in the same universal vibration.

When these five trajectories converge in Little Jumbo's gravitational well, expect original compositions that oscillate between through-composed themes, world music influences, free jazz adventures, and whatever else manifests when accomplished musicians stop asking "what genre is this?" and start asking "what does the Empyrean sound like tonight?"

First Set: The Empyrean Trio in its natural three-body orbit
Second Set: Quintet configuration achieving critical mass

Witness the moment when Mount Olympus meets the music of the spheres, when cosmic jazz meets Appalachian alchemy, when three becomes five and Little Jumbo becomes a launching pad for sounds that were never meant to be contained by atmosphere, architecture, or anyone's preconceived notions of what a Tuesday night should sound like.

Launch sequence begins at 7. No spacesuits required, but recommended for full immersion.