Pavel Wlosok

A Czech pianist who arrived in Texas in 1995 with one backpack and fifteen hundred dollars in savings, Pavel Wlosok has spent the decades since building one of the more quietly remarkable careers in American jazz. He was sixteen when the Velvet Revolution opened the borders of his country, and the music that had been rationed behind the Iron Curtain came flooding in all at once, classical and bebop and everything after. You can still hear that absorption in the way he plays, a pianist who moves between Moravian folk inheritance and post-bop language as though the distance between them were a rumor.

His resume reads like a who's-who of the last forty years of the music: Joe Lovano, Randy Brecker, Ingrid Jensen, Kenny Wheeler, Paquito D'Rivera, Dave Liebman. He holds the Gil Evans Fellowship, given to a single composer-arranger each year. He has been a professor of jazz at Western Carolina University since 2002 and had a piece premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2007. He records in Sylva, tours Prague and Krakow each summer, and teaches the next generation of Southern Appalachian jazz players the rest of the year.

None of that tells you what it's like to hear him. Pavel plays with the unhurried authority of someone who has nothing to prove and a lot he still wants to say. His touch is lyrical without being sentimental, his harmonic language spacious, his lines built with the architectural care of a composer who also happens to improvise. This performance is part of Little Jumbo's curated music series and is free to attend, the creature watching from its corner as ever.