Jack Wilkins has spent his career turning landscapes into music. Not metaphorically — literally. As a composer-in-residence at the Banff Centre in the Canadian Rockies, he wrote pieces shaped by glacial ridgelines and the particular silence of high altitude. At Acadia National Park in Maine, he composed a suite inspired by the crusade of cars climbing Cadillac Mountain at sunrise and the rhythms of the Atlantic against granite. In the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where he grew up in Greensboro listening to his older brothers play Maceo Parker and Jr. Walker records, he created The Blue and Green Project — a recording that braided Appalachian roots music with jazz and R&B, incorporating the sound of a blacksmith's anvil from a shop in Spruce Pine. Seven albums as a leader. A Fulbright Scholar appointment at the University of Calgary. Artist residencies in Sweden and Appalachia and along the coast of Maine. Featured soloist on Chuck Owen's River Runs and Whispers on the Wind, both Grammy Award finalists. Thirty-plus years directing Jazz Studies at the University of South Florida, where his USF Jazztet has played Montreux, North Sea, Vienne, and Umbria and toured South Africa. JazzTimes once noted that despite his academic credentials, there is nothing academic about his playing — that what sets him apart is his emotional directness, his ability to swing from the heels up.
He keeps coming back to North Carolina. Every Christmas he returns to Greensboro to play with Piedmont Songbag. The mountains pull at him. And tonight they've pulled him to Little Jumbo, where he's leading a quartet built from musicians who understand what it means to let a place get inside your sound.
Andy Page holds the guitar chair. Senior lecturer of jazz guitar at Appalachian State's Hayes School of Music for more than two decades, Andy is Zack Page's identical twin — the one who got the guitar when their father handed out instruments on Christmas morning. He has carried that guitar from the Montreux Jazz Festival to Japan's Muroran Jazz Cruise to German jazz workshops, but chose to plant himself in Boone, where the Blue Ridge informs everything he plays. His courses range from jazz improvisation to the History of Rock Music to Heavy Metal Culture, because the Page brothers never believed in walls between genres.
Zack Page is on bass. The twin who got the four-string inheritance, Zack has played roughly eight thousand performances since the mid-1990s — a career that runs from Billy Higgins and Delfeayo Marsalis in New York to co-founding Asheville's gypsy jazz ensemble One Leg Up to anchoring sessions at Landslide Studio with Jeff Sipe. He graduated summa cum laude from UNC Wilmington, played Montreux while still in college, and has spent the decades since proving his father's theory that every good band needs a good bass man. Putting the Page twins on the same stage with Wilkins means three musicians with deep North Carolina roots and decades of shared musical geography — Appalachian State, UNC system, the same mountain air moving through different instruments.
Justin Watt holds down the drums. Born in Ravenna, Ohio, trained at Kent State and Youngstown State with teachers from the Cleveland Orchestra and the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra, Watt spent two years touring with the Glenn Miller Orchestra across the United States, Japan, and Canada before settling in Asheville in 2008. He has since become one of the region's most in-demand drummers, anchoring the Keith Davis, Like Mind, and Asheville Art trios, performing with the Asheville Jazz Orchestra, and co-curating the Asheville Original Music Series. He teaches at UNC Asheville, Furman, and the Asheville Music School — a musician whose versatility spans big band precision and intimate trio conversation with equal commitment.
This is a quartet of educators who never stopped being players, of players who never let teaching calcify their instincts. Wilkins brings the landscape — the ridgelines, the national parks, the mountain music of his childhood. The Pages bring the family frequency, the twin telepathy, the accumulated weight of thousands of gigs. Watt brings the Ohio precision tempered by seventeen years of Asheville's anything-goes ethos. Little Jumbo's curated Monday series brings the room — small enough that every note lands somewhere, dark enough that the creature in the corner can listen without being disturbed. This one's free.
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.
Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Andy Page has become a cornerstone of Boone's vibrant music scene as a senior lecturer of jazz guitar at Appalachian State University's Hayes School of Music. For over two decades, this versatile virtuoso has woven his guitar strings through the fabric of the High Country's musical landscape, transforming local venues into stages of sonic storytelling. Together with his twin brother Zack, Andy has been known to arrive at open jams and parties, captivating audiences with their deep groove and seemingly endless musical creativity. His fingers dance across fretboards with equal fluency in jazz, rock, and original compositions, while his academic pursuits span from the History of Rock Music to Heavy Metal Culture. A true musical nomad, Andy has carried his craft from the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland to Japan's Muroran Jazz Cruise, and through jazz workshops in Germany. Yet he chose to plant his roots in the mountains of North Carolina, where he continues to nurture the next generation of musicians while maintaining his own creative flame through groups like The Page Brothers Trio and Swing Guitars—a testament to an artist who found his perfect harmony between teaching and performing in the shadow of the Appalachians.
Jack Wilkins transforms tenor saxophone into a compass for musical exploration, his horn pointing toward everything from the Canadian Rockies to the Appalachian ridgelines, from Swedish jazz clubs to Grammy-nominated orchestral suites. As Director of Jazz Studies at the University of South Florida, Wilkins has built a career on proving that the most compelling music happens when you're brave enough to let geography shape your sound—whether that's drawing inspiration from Banff Centre artist residencies or channeling American roots music through Blue Ridge mountain culture. His seven albums as a leader read like a musical atlas: "The Rundle Sessions" and "The Banff Project" capture the expansive beauty of the Canadian Rockies, while "The Blue and Green Project" mines the soul of Appalachian tradition. Wilkins doesn't just play jazz—he composes landscapes, whether collaborating with Swedish legends like Jon Allan or serving as featured soloist on Chuck Owen's Grammy-nominated "River Runs: A Concerto for Jazz Guitar, Saxophone and Orchestra." This Yamaha clinician and Fulbright Scholar understands that great jazz education and great jazz performance aren't separate activities—they're two sides of the same creative exploration. His USF Jazztet has graced stages from Montreux to North Sea Jazz festivals, proving that Wilkins' approach to music-making creates artists who can hold their own on any international stage. In his hands, the tenor saxophone becomes both teacher and student, always seeking that next musical horizon.
Justin Watt embodies the rare breed of drummer who's equally at home anchoring a world-famous big band or exploring intimate trio conversations in Asheville's vibrant jazz scene. This Ohio native transformed childhood percussion lessons into a musical passport that took him from Kent State and Youngstown State master's programs to a two-year stint behind the kit with the legendary Glenn Miller Orchestra, touring stages across the United States, Japan, and Canada. Since settling in Asheville in 2008, Watt has become the Blue Ridge's go-to rhythmic architect, performing regularly with the Keith Davis, "Like Mind," and "Asheville Art" Trios—all groups dedicated to advancing the art of jazz trio playing. He's also the backbone for the Greenville Jazz Collective Quintet and frequently performs with the Asheville Jazz Orchestra, proving his versatility across ensemble sizes and styles. Beyond the jazz clubs, Watt has shared stages with notable artists like Jim McNeely, Joey De Francesco, Bobby Shew, and Jimmy Heath, while also bringing his rhythmic expertise to regional theater productions. As an educator at UNC Asheville, Furman University, and the Asheville Music School, he passes on the fundamentals that built his own career—proving that the best drummers don't just keep time, they create the foundation that allows musical magic to flourish.