The first instrument Alfred Sergel IV ever touched was an 18-inch cymbal his father brought home from the band room. His dad was a band director — started in the schools, eventually landed at a college — and Al was the little kid walking next to the drumline, absorbing the pulse of organized sound before he had any language for what it was. The cymbal was surplus from the marching band, dented and heavy and probably not worth keeping, but it was enough. He hit it and the vibration traveled through his hands and into the rest of his life.
What came next was liner notes. Sergel got hold of a jazz record — the specifics matter less than the chain reaction — and started reading the credits. Art Blakey. Elvin Jones. Philly Joe Jones. Jo Jones. Ed Thigpen. Roy Haynes. He wrote down every name, took the list to the library, and began researching their discographies one by one. This is how a drummer builds a lineage in reverse: not through apprenticeship but through archaeology, digging backward through the catalog until the names become sounds and the sounds become a vocabulary. He studied percussion and jazz studies at Florida State, then spent a year at Berklee with John Ramsey, and by the time he emerged he had internalized enough history to move comfortably through nearly any musical situation he encountered — which turned out to be a wider range of situations than most drummers ever see.
Sergel's career has unfolded across territories that don't usually share a map. He joined the Chad Lawson Trio in 2000 and watched their single climb to number seven on the national jazz charts. He toured internationally with singer-songwriter Jason Upton, appearing on the BBC. He shared stages with Bob Mintzer, Jim Snidero, Marcus Printup, Nnenna Freelon, and Ricky Skaggs — names drawn from hard bop, straight-ahead, and deep country, often in the same season. He served as Worship Director at MorningStar Ministries, playing drums in sacred contexts where the music carries a different kind of weight. He sat in with Bernadette Peters, Joan Rivers, and Sir Tim Rice. He recorded with Grammy-winning bassist Tim Lefebvre, whose work with David Bowie represents exactly the kind of genre-dissolving ambition that Sergel's own playing has always pointed toward.
For years, Sergel carried song ideas around on his phone — voice memos recorded in late-night places after gigs, hummed melodies and rhythmic fragments captured before they evaporated. He thought of them as sketches, not compositions. Then a friend listened to a batch of them and asked a question that changed his trajectory: Why don't you think these are songs? That was the moment the Alfred Sergel IVtet was born — the name a sly fold of his generational numeral into a quartet designation, the band itself a vehicle for the music he'd been carrying in his pocket for years. Charlotte musicians Ron Brendle, Troy Conn, and Phil Howe joined him. The debut EP caught the attention of All About Jazz. His single "Y Closed" landed at NPR Music. Sleepless Journey hit number one on the NACC jazz charts. His compositions draw from Beck and Tycho as readily as from Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau — pop melodicism threaded through jazz architecture, the kind of music that makes sense when you've spent three decades crossing between sacred and secular, arena and club, the library and the bandstand.
Based in Charlotte and teaching at Davidson College and Central Piedmont, Sergel remains a working musician in the truest sense — someone for whom the gig is never just the gig but always a continuation of that first vibration, the one that traveled from a surplus marching cymbal through a kid's hands and into a life spent listening for what comes next.