**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

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

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.

Jason Krekel attended Jimmy Buffett concerts as a baby—strapped to his father Tim's back while dad played lead guitar—absorbing the songwriter, studio, and publishing scene of Nashville before he could even speak. When his father handed him a guitar at 14 with zero pressure attached, young Krekel took lessons with future collaborator Jay Sanders, played their first gig together in 11th grade, then headed to Boone for college where he dove headfirst into bluegrass, old-time, and whatever else had strings attached. Three decades later, this multi-instrumentalist has built an Asheville empire of sound that defies categorization: hot jazz revivalist with the Firecracker Jazz Band (playing Bonnaroo and keeping 1920s dance floors packed), surf rock tornado with The Krektones, punk ukulele provocateur in Mad Tea Party/Krekel and Whoa, bluegrass explorer with Snake Oil Medicine Show, and collaborator with everyone from Seattle guitar legend Baby Gramps to Trombone Shorty. His philosophy on why vintage jazz still slaps? "People had to make their entertainment. They couldn't just push a button and get a Spotify playlist." Krekel doesn't just play music—he designs album covers through his Hand-Cranked Letterpress, appeared on David Letterman, recorded comedy songs for LaZoom tours, and somehow made the 2004 BlueBrass Project (Asheville roots meeting New Orleans brass) make perfect sense. His latest venture, Bam-A-Lam (launched 2023), proves his point: "Everything I've done in my musical life has informed how I play now." From banjo to guitar, from Jazz Age parlors to garage rock chaos, from Nashville birthright to Asheville chosen-home, Krekel proves that the most interesting careers spiral outward like vinyl grooves—each rotation revealing new collaborations, new sounds, new reasons to make people care about music made with actual hands.

jasonkrekel.com

When Andy Pond enrolled at Appalachian State University in Boone, his brother George and George's then-wife Caroline joined him to form Snake Oil Medicine Show, coining the term "slamgrass" for their colorful and kinetic update on old-time string music—soon inflecting it with deep pockets of jam-inspired groove, shades of rockabilly smoothness, and most famously, comfortable reggae rhythms. It was, as Caroline puts it, "the perfect thing for us to do, to move to North Carolina, to be in the roots of Appalachian music and learn from old time music and bluegrass music." Nineteen years into Snake Oil's career, the band has become something of an Asheville institution—frequenting every music festival and venue these mountains offer, representing an intersection of world music and traditional Southern sound that's become synonymous with the city's sonic hallmarks. Their experiences traveling to Jamaica to learn reggae music and incorporating bluegrass with reggae created "such an amazing sound" that North Carolina—Boone and Asheville—proved the perfect place to experiment, mixing genres with abandon. Beyond Snake Oil, Andy became a founding force in AVAS (The Acoustic Vibration Appreciation Society) alongside Jay Sanders, Jason Krekel, and others—a progressive acoustic group that released their self-titled debut in 2000, blending newgrass with influences ranging from Bill Frisell and Mahavishnu Orchestra to Scandinavian folk legends. These days, this teacher and musician focuses on "fostering creative learning environments, promoting World Peace through Music and Art, and attending to forgiveness and acceptance." From Boone student to Asheville institution, from slamgrass inventor to world peace advocate, Andy Pond proves that the best banjo players don't just pick strings—they pick philosophies, picking their way through genres and geographies until they find the sound that makes reggae and bluegrass not just coexist, but groove together like they were always meant to.