Consider the distances traveled to arrive at this particular room on this particular Monday night. A trumpet that has filled Madison Square Garden and the Sydney Opera House alongside Michael Bublé, now playing three feet from your cocktail glass. A baritone saxophone that has shared air with Aretha Franklin, Robert Glasper, and Ambrose Akinmusire, now threading low-register phrases through the murmur of a crowded bar. A piano that might have stayed silent forever if a freak lip injury hadn't ended a promising trumpet career and sent a political science major from Capitol Hill back to his parents' house in Nebraska to woodshed eight hours a day until his hands could do what his mouth no longer could. A bass that has crossed every ocean and touched every continent, anchored gypsy jazz and heavy metal and everything unnamed in between. And drums that came to a guitarist who switched instruments and discovered that rhythm was the question he'd been trying to answer all along.
The Core is what happens when five musicians with no business being in the same band end up becoming the most natural ensemble in Asheville.
Justin Ray and Jacob Rodriguez came to these mountains on the same wave — Bublé bandmates who fell for Western North Carolina during a break from touring arenas in forty-five countries. Ray, an Albuquerque native trained at Berklee and USC, had already logged years on the Los Angeles scene with Peter Erskine and Kurt Elling before the arena years began. Rodriguez, a San Antonio kid who grew up on his brother's NWA and Guns N' Roses records before an eighth-grade Duke Ellington album rearranged his priorities, earned dual degrees at the Manhattan School of Music under Joe Temperley. Both chose Asheville. Both now teach at UNC Asheville. Both understand that a room this size demands more honesty than any stadium ever could.
Bill Bares arrived from another direction entirely. A military brat who landed in Omaha, he was good enough on trumpet to make the McDonald's All-American Band before the injury that rerouted his life. Amherst College gave him a political science degree. D.C. jazz clubs gave him the itch. The University of Miami's jazz program — where his piano teacher had studied with Oscar Peterson and roomed with Bill Evans — gave him the vocabulary. A Harvard ethnomusicology Ph.D. gave him the framework to think about jazz as cultural history. Teaching stints at Brown, Berklee, and the New England Conservatory gave him the pedagogy. And then Asheville gave him the room to put it all together, night after night, as director of jazz studies at UNC Asheville and as a pianist whose touch carries the weight of everything he's studied and everywhere he's been.
Zack Page has been averaging 275 gigs a year since the mid-nineties. Born in Virginia, raised on his father's Duck Dunn records and his mother's old-time Appalachian singing tradition, he picked up a bass at twelve alongside his twin brother Andy's guitar and never found a reason to put it down. He's played with Billy Higgins, Delfeayo Marsalis, Eddie Daniels, and Babik Reinhardt. He's worked cruise ships and Swiss jazz festivals and LA studios. In Asheville, he holds down the low end for so many projects that listing them would take longer than the set itself. What matters is what he does in this room with these four people — which is build a floor so solid that everyone else can take risks they wouldn't dare take without him.
Evan Martin came to drums sideways, through years as a guitarist leading bands before discovering that rhythm was the instrument he was born to play. That origin story matters. He listens like a melodic player. He responds to phrases, not just patterns. You can hear it in his work with Amanda Anne Platt and The Honeycutters, in Brian Felix's organ trio, and especially here, where the conversation between five musicians moves at the speed of trust.
They've recorded together at Echo Mountain Studios. They've played these Monday nights long enough to develop the kind of shorthand that can't be rehearsed. The creature in the corner has watched them find something true hundreds of times. This is the group that lives at the center of Asheville's jazz life, and they play for free every time they walk through the door.
Featuring
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.
In Asheville's Monday night jazz ecosystem, Evan Martin represents the rare breed of drummer who understands that sensitivity and power aren't opposites—they're dance partners. As a cornerstone of the local scene, Martin has mastered the art of musical telepathy, reading room dynamics and bandmate intentions with the precision of a master craftsman who knows exactly when to whisper and when to roar. His kit becomes a conversation partner rather than a time machine, responding to melodic phrases with percussive punctuation that feels both inevitable and surprising. This is drumming as collaborative art form, where every snare accent and hi-hat whisper serves the greater musical narrative, making Martin not just a timekeeper but a storyteller whose vocabulary happens to be built from wood, metal, and perfect timing.
From San Antonio street corners to Michael Bublé's Grammy-winning stages, Jacob Rodriguez has woven a musical tapestry that spans continents and genres. This Manhattan School of Music alumnus doesn't just play saxophone—he channels stories through reed and breath, whether he's painting midnight hues with Ambrose Akinmusire in Brooklyn's underground scene or igniting arena crowds alongside pop royalty. Now nestled in Asheville's Blue Ridge embrace, Jacob has become the valley's secret weapon, teaching the next generation at UNC Asheville while moonlighting with everything from Hard Bop Explosion's fire-breathing quintet to the mystical rhythms of Coconut Cake's traditional Congolese explorations. His baritone sax doesn't just anchor the low end—it rumbles with the wisdom of a world traveler who's learned that the most profound music happens when you're brave enough to blend your influences into something entirely new.
In a scene filled with talented musicians, Justin Ray has emerged as both a formidable trumpet voice and the kind of musical leader who makes everyone around him want to dig deeper into their craft. Leading the Justin Ray Quartet with the kind of understated authority that comes from deep listening and deeper respect for the tradition, Ray embodies the collaborative spirit that keeps Asheville's jazz scene thriving. His trumpet doesn't just play melodies—it starts conversations, poses questions, and creates spaces where other musicians can discover new aspects of their own voices. This is leadership through inspiration rather than domination, proving that the best bandleaders don't just direct the music, they elevate it by recognizing and nurturing the unique gifts that each musician brings to the collective sound.
From Nebraska to Harvard to Little Jumbo, Dr. Bill Bares embodies the scholarly soul of jazz—a NEH Distinguished Professor whose academic credentials from Amherst College read like a jazz education manifesto written in political science and piano poetry. When a lip injury ended his All-American trumpet dreams, Bares discovered that sometimes life's detours lead to destinations you never knew you were seeking. Now directing jazz studies at UNC Asheville after teaching stints at Harvard, Brown, Berklee, and the New England Conservatory, he transforms every performance into a master class where bebop meets book learning, where chord changes become cultural commentary. His scholarly articles in American Music and Jazz Research Journal prove that the deepest musical truths emerge when academic rigor meets artistic passion, making every Little Jumbo appearance a reminder that jazz isn't just entertainment—it's American intellectual history told in real time through eighty-eight keys.
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