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.

You have almost certainly never heard a bassoon do what **Michael Rabinowitz** makes it do. Not because the instrument can't — it spans three octaves, drops below the baritone saxophone, climbs into tenor range, and its double reed can articulate with a staccato sharp enough to cut glass. But for most of the last century, the bassoon lived in orchestral chairs and film scores, waiting patiently for someone to ask it to improvise. Rabinowitz asked. He's been asking since the late seventies, and by now, the question has been answered so thoroughly that he stands alone as the first musician in jazz history to devote an entire career exclusively to improvising on the instrument. He picked up the bassoon at sixteen. There were no models for what he wanted to do with it — a handful of doublers like Illinois Jacquet had played jazz on bassoon between other horns, but nobody had committed to it completely. So Rabinowitz taught himself the language by imitating saxophone players, trumpet players, trombonists, translating their phrasing through a double reed that behaves nothing like any of those instruments. He studied at SUNY Purchase, came out in the late seventies, and walked into a New York scene that had no category for him. He made one. The résumé that followed reads like a dare. Wynton Marsalis. Red Rodney. Joe Lovano. Chris Potter. Dave Douglas. Anthony Braxton. Elvis Costello. He co-founded the Charles Mingus Orchestra — a large ensemble that, like Mingus himself, has always treated unusual instrumentation as a philosophical position rather than a gimmick. He has played the Hollywood Bowl, Tanglewood, Newport, Montreal, Berlin, and the JVC Jazz Festival. He led his own quartet, Bassoon in the Wild, through the Frick Museum and the Vanderbilt Planetarium and the stages of downtown New York. He earned a Chamber Music America grant for a transatlantic collaboration with French oboist Jean-Luc Fillon. And he released seven albums as a leader, composing most of the material himself — music that moves from bebop to free improvisation to something that has no name yet because he's still inventing it. His most recent record, *Next Chapter*, arrived on his own Blue Ridge Bassoon Records label — a name that quietly signals where his center of gravity has shifted. The album captures the quartet he assembled at Django in New York City: pianist Matt King, bassist Andy McKee, and drummer Tommy Campbell, four musicians who found an intuitive chemistry almost immediately and have been deepening it since. There is a strange and beautiful logic to hearing this instrument in a room like Little Jumbo — a space built for sounds that don't quite fit anywhere else, where the weird art watches from the walls and the cocktails are crafted with the same attention to detail that Rabinowitz brings to every phrase. The bassoon's voice is ancient and knowing, comic and mournful in the same breath, capable of a warmth that fills a small room the way sunlight fills a jar. This is music that could not exist anywhere else in the world, played by a musician who spent five decades proving that the instrument everyone overlooked was the one with the most left to say. Free, as always.

In 1975, a group of students at the University of Miami School of Music — the same halls that produced Pat Metheny, Jaco Pastorius, and Bruce Hornsby — recorded a demo album called *The Great Spectacular* and pressed a thousand copies. The keyboardist was **Steve Davidowski**. Two years later, on the strength of that tape and a tip from Allman Brothers keyboardist Chuck Leavell, Capricorn Records signed them. The album was *Free Fall*. The band was the Dixie Dregs. And the sound — an impossible braid of rock, jazz, classical, country, and bluegrass played with a virtuosity that bordered on the absurd — would earn six Grammy nominations across the decade that followed and influence generations of musicians who heard it and thought, *wait, you can do that?* Davidowski left the Dregs after *Free Fall* to join Vassar Clements, the legendary fiddler whose own genre-defying approach to the instrument earned him comparisons to Miles Davis and Isaac Stern in the same breath. Playing saxophone and keyboards in Clements' band, Davidowski moved deeper into the territory between jazz and roots music — a space most musicians talk about occupying but few actually inhabit. When he resurfaced with the original Dregs lineup for the Dawn of the Dregs reunion tour in 2018 — the first time all five members had shared a stage in over forty years — reviewers noted that his runs and solos sounded like they'd never stopped evolving, as though the intervening decades had only deepened whatever reservoir he draws from. These days Davidowski lives in Marshall, just up the mountain from Asheville, in Madison County — a place music scholars identify as a source community for Appalachian balladry, old-time, and bluegrass. He fits into this landscape the way a jazz chord fits into a hymn: unexpectedly, but once you hear it, inevitably. He walks around town with a piccolo in his hand. He runs a Monday night blues jam. For over sixteen years, he has organized an annual benefit concert for Neighbors in Need, a food pantry and crisis organization serving Madison County — a tradition that continued even after the flooding that devastated the region. He plays piano, saxophone, keyboards. He leads a band called Xenobilly. He is, by all accounts, exactly the kind of musician a small mountain town is lucky to have and rarely knows it has. Little Jumbo's Monday series brings Davidowski into a room built for exactly this kind of encounter — where a musician who helped launch one of the most technically ambitious bands in American rock history can settle into a cocktail bar full of strange art and play whatever he wants, for whoever shows up, for free. The creature on the wall has heard a lot of music in this room. It hasn't heard this.

**Rick Dilling** drove from Pennsylvania to the mountains of North Carolina in the summer of 1973 to play golf. He thought he wanted to be a teaching pro. That first week in Boone, a jazz pianist hired him for a gig, and he never went back home. More than fifty years later, he is still in these mountains, still playing, still the person every bandleader in western North Carolina calls first. The origin story matters because it tells you something essential about how Dilling operates — he follows the sound. He grew up listening to his father's records without knowing the names on them: Miles Davis, the Modern Jazz Quartet, JJ Johnson, Dave Brubeck. He loved the Tijuana Brass. He loved Basie and Ellington and Goodman and Woody Herman. Then, at twelve, a drum teacher handed him a Buddy Rich album, and the entire instrument opened up. Later it was Tony Williams, Grady Tate, Ed Thigpen, Joe Morello, Mel Lewis — each one revealing a different dimension of what a drummer could be inside the music rather than on top of it. He enrolled at Appalachian State University, graduated with a degree in Music Industry Studies, and then spent the next thirty-eight years on the jazz faculty there, teaching applied drum set to generations of students — including Shirazette Tinnin, who went on to lead her own band in New York City and credits Dilling with helping her get her first kit. The list of people who have trusted Dilling behind them reads like a survey course in American jazz: Clark Terry, Herb Ellis, Phil Woods, Ernie Watts, Houston Person, Joe Temperley, Billy Taylor, Tony Monaco. He played with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra and the Nelson Riddle Orchestra. At the Brevard Music Center, he shared a stage with Louie Bellson — set up his drums right beside the legendary drummer's kit, played the first half of the concert, then watched Bellson play the second. When the crowd demanded an encore, Bellson called Dilling back out for a drum battle on "In a Mellow Tone." Bellson could have buried him. He didn't. That's the kind of respect Dilling's playing earns. Saxophonist Todd Wright calls him "Mr. Tasty" — a nickname that captures something technical language can't quite reach. Dilling listens. He supports. He does what the music needs before anyone has to ask. Vocalist Wendy Hayes put it more precisely: he is there for the music first, not for himself, and that selflessness is what elevates him from player to artist. In Asheville, where he has been based since 2011, he is the drummer for the Asheville Jazz Orchestra — where he now serves as Artistic Director — as well as the Michael Jefry Stevens Trio, the Richard Shulman Group, the Todd Wright Quartet, and the Wendy Jones Quartet. He leads his own big band, Time Check, a tribute to the music of Buddy Rich that brings the full-throated roar of a seventeen-piece ensemble to stages that rarely get to feel that kind of air displacement. Dilling is the kind of musician a city builds a jazz scene around without always realizing it. He's on the bandstand five nights a week, anchoring sessions at the White Horse in Black Mountain, at Highland Brewing, at Biltmore Estate, at every room that takes the music seriously. He has shaped the sound of this region not just through performance but through decades of teaching — sending students out into the world with the understanding that swing is not a style but a commitment, and that the drummer's job is to make everyone else sound like the best version of themselves.