Past Events

Jeff Sipe has long understood that drums are portals, a knowing shaped by years alongside Colonel Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit into something that moves between precision and the untranslatable. Quinn Sternberg's bass holds the gravitational field steady while melody and time spiral outward. Jay Sanders builds sonic architecture from effects and intention, a Nashville-trained player who chose instead to become a cosmologist, mapping the territories between silence and sound. Together as the Blingus Trio, they converge at Little Jumbo not to impose a vision but to dissolve the conditions that make imposition possible.

Brian Felix has spent decades building a musical life that moves between continents, traditions, and textures — from the Fillmore to Aberdeen, from jazz-rock to the classroom where he teaches improvisation and the Beatles with equal seriousness. Now rooted in Asheville, he brings the organ trio format somewhere new. The Brian Felix Organ Trio draws from gospel weight, samba motion, surf shimmer, reggae drift, and ambient space, holding it all together through something harder to name than genre: a shared listening that Tim Fischer and Evan Martin have made second nature. Their 2025 record Level Up landed an All About Jazz song of the day and earned praise for being genuinely eclectic without being scattered. That same quality shows up live, where the music has room to shift and surprise.

Alan Hall has spent four decades asking questions that drums answer differently every night. On Wednesday he brings his Exploritoreum to Little Jumbo, assembling four collaborators whose individual paths — through Cologne jazz clubs, university concert halls, eighteen states and a handful of Canadian provinces, the gravitational architecture of upright bass — converge into something that resists any single tradition's claim on it. Bill Bares approaches the piano the way a political theorist approaches a primary source. Tim Fischer exists where doctoral precision and street-level instinct stop arguing and start listening. Dylan Hannan's saxophone carries the memory of a middle school revelation that never quite resolved into certainty, which is exactly the point.

In 1957, Prestige put four tenor saxophonists in a room and pressed record. Jack Wilkins borrows the premise for a Monday night at Little Jumbo, bringing his own tenor into conversation with Dylan Hannan while a rhythm section quietly threatens to steal the whole evening. Wilkins has carried his saxophone from the Canadian Rockies to Swedish stages to Grammy-nominated orchestral sessions, and Hannan brings the particular attentiveness of someone who studied composition and never quite stopped thinking that way. Two tenors in dialogue tend to sharpen each other, the phrasing trading off until something unexpected surfaces.

Four musicians walk into a room and something older than genre takes over. Jay Sanders, Will Boyd, Zack Page, and Alan Hall have spent enough years in the study of improvisation to know when to lead a thought and when to let it dissolve. Sanders finds the frequencies a guitar doesn't usually reach. Boyd's reeds carry breath like a question that keeps changing its own answer. Page holds the low end with the patience of someone who understands that foundation is a kind of philosophy. Hall moves through rhythm the way weather moves — purposeful and indifferent at once. Together they write originals that can settle into melody one moment and abandon it the next, touching Americana, free jazz, soul, and territories that don't have names yet. None of it feels like a survey.

Pavel Wlosok brings his quartet to the corner for an evening of contemporary jazz played by musicians who have all, in their own ways, arrived in Asheville by circuitous routes. Pavel himself came from Ostrava via Texas, a Czech pianist who landed at the University of North Texas in 1995 with one backpack and has spent the decades since building one of the more quietly remarkable careers in American jazz. He is joined by Jacob Rodriguez, a San Antonio-bred saxophonist whose credits run from M...

Four musicians walk into a room and something older than genre takes over. Jay Sanders on guitar, Will Boyd on reeds, Zack Page on bass, and Alan Hall on percussion have spent enough years in improvisational study together that the usual signposts stop mattering. What emerges moves through composed themes, soul-rooted passages, free excursions, and stretches of noise that feel less like chaos and more like the sound a room makes when it finally exhales. The creature in the corner has heard a lot of music pass through these walls. This is the kind that makes it lean forward. Come find out what happens when four people dissolve the map and trust what lives underneath it.

Two instruments walk into a room carrying centuries between them. The saxophone, invented in the 1840s, was always a little strange, a hybrid thing that did not quite belong to any existing family. The kalimba predates it by a long stretch, its voice built into the structure of African music at a foundational level. Will Boyd has spent his life in conversation with the saxophone's soul tradition, the lineage of Eddie Harris and Johnny Hodges, while extending that conversation into electronic territory through the EWI, an instrument that opens new rooms inside the ones he already knows.

Four people walk into a bar in Asheville carrying everything their bodies have accumulated — Jay Sanders, Will Boyd, Zack Page, and Alan Hall — and what comes out is not a set of songs so much as a series of decisions made in close proximity to one another, in real time, with no safety net and no obligation to repeat themselves. Sanders bends guitar melody through angles that suggest he has been listening to things most people cannot hear. Boyd's reeds and EWI carry frequencies that began somewhere in the red clay churches of South Carolina and have since traveled far enough to lose the map home. Page anchors the whole moving thing with low-end mass and impeccable judgment.

Twin brothers, four minutes and forty years apart in the same breath. Andy and Zack Page grew up inside music rather than arriving at it, shaped by a household where blues and heavy metal and old-time singing occupied the same air, where deep listening was the curriculum long before either of them stood in a classroom to teach it. Andy holds a chair at Appalachian State, where he teaches jazz guitar alongside the history of rock and metal, because to him it has always been one long unbroken human conversation. He has played Montreux, toured Japan, performed for Maya Angelou. Zack has taken his bass to all fifty states and across the Caribbean, Australia, South America, Europe, and the Far East, and has recorded alongside Billy Higgins, Delfeayo Marsalis, and Babik Reinhardt, Django's son.

Casey Driessen sets up his stall on the third Sunday of every month, and what he brings to the table shifts each time. A fiddle in his hands becomes something stranger and more expansive than a fiddle has any right to be — looped back on itself, layered into something architectural, then dissolved before you can name what it was. The Sunday Bazaar is exactly what it sounds like: a market of sound where the inventory changes and nothing is priced the same twice. You might arrive expecting one thing and leave having heard three others. The walls here already hold their share of mysteries, and Driessen fits right in among them, adding his own to the collection. Come with an open hand and see what you walk out holding.

DJ Lil Meow Meow knows where the dancing is buried inside a Saturday night. She finds it the way you find an old song on a record you forgot you owned: suddenly, and then you cannot imagine how the room was ever quiet. Something in the walls already knows she is coming. Something in the corner has been waiting. She arrives at Little Jumbo on April 18th from 9 until midnight, and the floor will remember what it is for. There is a $5 cover.

Four musicians walk into the corner of the room where the light gets strange and something watches from the wall. Jay Sanders, Will Boyd, Zack Page, and Alan Hall have been listening to each other long enough that the listening itself has become a kind of language. Sanders pulls something through the guitar that sounds like it was already there, waiting. Boyd's reeds move the air in ways that feel older than the song. Page holds the low end like a hand on a shoulder. Hall finds the pulse beneath the pulse. Together they move through composed melody, open improvisation, quiet Americana, and whatever lies past the edge of that — not because they planned to but because that is where the conversation goes. What happens in this room on this night will not happen again exactly this way.

Five musicians walk into a room and something shifts. Evan Martin, Justin Ray, Bill Bares, Zack Page, and Jacob Rodriguez play together as The Core, and that name carries weight — not as a brand but as a philosophy. These five have found what most ensembles spend years searching for: the place where individual voices stop competing and start listening so deeply that the music seems to arrive from somewhere outside any one of them. Standards become confessions here. Silence becomes as intentional as sound. There is no grandstanding, no moment where technique announces itself ahead of feeling. What you get instead is five people who have learned that showing up fully, every phrase, is the hardest and most honest thing a musician can do.

There is a sound that listeners learn to recognize and cannot quite explain. It crosses whatever instrument Will Boyd has in his hands on a given night, saxophone or flute or clarinet or EWI, arriving each time with the same unmistakable signature. Technique without feeling, in Boyd's world, is expensive noise. He grew up in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in a house where the Isley Brothers, Dolly Parton, and Mozart all moved through the same rooms, and that breadth never left him. He studied under Jerry Coker, Zim Ngqawana, and Donald Brown, three musicians representing entirely different philosophies of what a horn could do. Coker eventually called him a modern musician steeped in tradition, and no one has improved on that description since.

Dive into the sonic waves of Quinn Sternberg's Mind Beach—where jazz becomes a landscape and every note washes over you like tide meeting shore. This isn't your typical Monday night. It's an expedition into the spaces between beats, where four master musicians construct entire worlds from reed, string, skin, and ivory. Quinn Sternberg's bass serves as your anchor, holding gravity steady while Jacob Rodriguez's baritone sax paints horizons in deep indigo. Joe Enright's drums pulse like the ...

Every atom in your body was forged inside a dying star. The calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood, the carbon threading through your DNA — all of it cooked at temperatures beyond human language, scattered across the void, and reassembled over billions of years into something that walks into a bar on a Tuesday and listens. Sanders, Boyd, Page, and Hall are four arrangements of stellar debris who have chosen to spend their brief window of consciousness building original music together in real time. Jay Sanders refracts melody through a prism of everything from Sharrock to Hartford, bending light no one else can see. Will Boyd carries frequencies rooted in South Carolina red clay, now orbiting through dimensions his EWI opens like airlock doors.

Brian Felix has been moving through music for a long time — San Francisco stages, Scottish festival halls, rooms where improvisation was the only map. Now he anchors himself in Asheville, teaching the next generation how sound thinks, and leading an organ trio that treats the tradition not as a ceiling but as a floor. Felix, guitarist Tim Fischer, and drummer Evan Martin have developed the kind of listening that does not need to be announced. Their 2025 record Level Up, all original compositions, landed an All About Jazz Song of the Day and reminded people that organ-based music still has places left to go. Special guest Jacob Rodriguez joins them tonight, adding another voice to a conversation that was already moving fast.

Four musicians walk into a room and something older than genre takes over. Jay Sanders on guitar, Will Boyd on reeds, Zack Page on bass, and Alan Hall on drums have spent enough time in the deep end of improvisation to know what lives down there. Their original compositions don't pick a lane so much as they render the concept of lanes temporarily meaningless — a melodic thread surfaces, a groove opens beneath it, then everything dissolves into something freer and stranger before reassembling into form again. Whatever the creature in the corner is looking at, it's probably this. Little Jumbo welcomes Sanders, Boyd, Page and Hall on Tuesday, March 24th. Free to attend, and that's the whole deal.

Jack Wilkins has spent his career letting places write music through him — glaciers in the Canadian Rockies, Atlantic granite along the Maine coast, the Blue Ridge where he grew up hearing Maceo Parker and Jr. Walker through his brothers' bedroom walls. The Blue and Green Project braided Appalachian roots with jazz and R&B, and somewhere in its grooves you can hear a blacksmith's anvil from Spruce Pine. Tonight he leads a quintet assembled from musicians who share his geography. Rick Simerly brings a trombone tradition that J.J. Johnson once called quite impressive — high praise offered simply. Andy and Zack Page are twins who received their instruments on the same Christmas morning and have been in harmonic conversation ever since.

Four musicians walk into a room carrying decades between them, and something that did not exist before begins to exist. That is the simplest way to describe what Sanders, Boyd, Page, and Hall do together, and it barely scratches the surface. Jay Sanders bends guitar melody through angles borrowed from everywhere and belonging nowhere obvious. Will Boyd's reeds and winds carry frequencies rooted in South Carolina red clay, now traveling through dimensions his EWI opens like doors into uncharted rooms. Zack Page — a man who has logged somewhere around 275 gigs a year since the mid-nineties — provides the gravitational center, the low mass that holds the whole orbiting system together.

The bassoon is the oldest voice in the room. Not Rick Dilling, who has spent fifty years woven into the musical fabric of these mountains. Not Steve Davidowski, who was cutting records with the Dixie Dregs before most of the cocktail menu's ingredients existed. Not Zack Page, who has averaged 275 gigs a year for three decades and still counting. The bassoon itself carries the memory of court music and cathedral acoustics and the low rumble of orchestral pits through centuries of continuous use, and Michael Rabinowitz — the only musician in jazz history to build an entire career improvising on it — is the one who taught it to speak this particular language.

Casey Driessen has spent twenty-five years taking a fiddle to places it was never supposed to go and finding out it was welcome everywhere. Twenty-two countries. A year wandering through Spain, Ireland, Scotland, India, Japan, and Finland with his family, recording with local musicians in whatever room or field offered itself. A one-man looping show called The Singularity. A notation system for percussive bowing he helped develop and then gave away so fiddlers everywhere could share a common language. And always, the red shoes. His Sunday Bazaar residency is a market laid out across one evening, the five-string fiddle looped into architecture that can move from Appalachian to raga to Nordic folk within a single piece, no two nights the same because that is the whole point.

Four musicians walk into a room and something older than genre takes over. Will Boyd breathes through his reeds like he's translating a language that predates words. Jay Sanders finds frequencies on guitar that feel less played than summoned. Zack Page holds the low end with the patience of someone who understands that foundation is its own kind of wisdom. Alan Hall keeps time the way rivers keep moving — purposeful, inevitable, alive to what surrounds them. Together these four have spent years learning to dissolve the walls between composition and pure invention, between structure and wandering, between what a piece is supposed to be and what it wants to become in the room.

Five musicians who have no business being this good together walk through the door every Monday and prove that they belong. Evan Martin came to drums after years as a guitarist and still listens like one, tracking phrases and responding to shape rather than just keeping time. Zack Page has played 275 gigs a year since the mid-nineties, crossed every ocean, anchored styles that have no shared name, and builds a floor here so solid that everyone else can afford to be brave.