**Alex Taub** started playing piano at six years old in Silver Spring, Maryland, which is not unusual. What's unusual is that by thirteen he had found his way to jazz — studying under pianist Jon Ozment and performing around the D.C. metropolitan area while most kids his age were still deciding whether to keep taking lessons. The instrument chose him early, and he had the good sense not to argue with it. At East Carolina University, he played in the Jazz Ensemble and performed at Lincoln Center and the Billy Taylor Jazz Festival, experiences that tend to recalibrate a young musician's understanding of what's possible. Then, in 2013, he moved to Asheville and did something that takes most transplants years to accomplish: he became essential. Not visible in the way that bandleaders are visible, but essential in the way that the best pianists are — the person everyone calls, the player whose touch and harmonic instincts make any room he sits in sound better than it did before he arrived. Jazz, funk, soul, R&B — Taub moves between idioms the way a fluent speaker moves between languages, without pausing to translate. A decade into building that reputation, he did something surprising. He left. He went to Montreal and enrolled at McGill University, pursuing a Master of Music in Jazz — the kind of decision that only makes sense if you understand what it means to be a working musician who still wants to be a student, who believes there are rooms in the instrument he hasn't opened yet. McGill's jazz program, housed in a city with its own deep improvisational tradition, gave him those rooms. He returned to the mountains with a degree and with whatever it is that happens to a player who steps away from the familiar long enough to hear it differently. Now he teaches at East Tennessee State University, and his duo recording *Six Feet Apart* with pandeiro master Scott Feiner — the founder of Pandeiro Jazz, whose four previous albums essentially invented a genre — captures something central about Taub's musicianship: the willingness to meet another tradition on its own terms and find the place where it intersects with his. Brazilian rhythm and jazz harmony and the particular warmth of a piano recorded at Seclusion Hill in Asheville, all of it threaded together by a musician who understands that versatility isn't the same thing as restlessness. Taub isn't searching for a style. He found it a long time ago. What he's still searching for is the edge of it — the place where what he knows meets what he doesn't, the next room in an instrument that started opening its doors to him when he was six years old.

alextaubmusic.com

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.

For three years, **Brad Walker** didn't play the saxophone. He had a degree in classical performance from LSU and a Teach for America placement in Brooklyn, where he taught math and science to special needs students and spent his nights sitting in the audience at the Village Vanguard, watching the greats play the instrument he had walked away from. He went to The Stone to hear John Zorn push music past the edge of recognition. He told everyone he met that he was a saxophonist, which he later admitted was a lie. But it was also, he came to understand, the truest thing about him. The distance between who you say you are and what you do with your days — that gap will eat you alive if you let it. Walker didn't let it. He went back to Louisiana, earned a master's in jazz studies from LSU, moved to New Orleans in 2011, and within six months was making a living on the bandstand. The Crescent City absorbed him completely. He became one of its most in-demand players, working with George Porter Jr. and the Meters' rhythm section, Rickie Lee Jones, Anders Osborne — the kind of company that doesn't tolerate passengers. His own quintet landed a four-star review in DownBeat for its debut, and his compositions drew attention for the way they functioned as narratives rather than vehicles for blowing. *The Dockside Sessions*, recorded at the legendary studio on Vermilion Bayou, became his love letter to the state that gave him his musical life. *A Sliver of Catharsis*, released in late 2025, is the most recent entry in a catalog that now spans seven releases as a leader, each one recorded with the kind of musicians who show up because the music demands it. Then Sturgill Simpson called. Or rather, the machinery around Simpson's *A Sailor's Guide to Earth* called, and Walker found himself leading a horn section through arenas, late-night television, and the Grammy Awards, where the album won Best Country. The Dap-Kings horns were on the record. The Grammys wanted them onstage. Simpson pulled Walker aside and told him the solo was his. That loyalty — the insistence on keeping faith with the musicians who built the thing — said as much about Walker's value as any review ever could. He played SNL. He played the Tonight Show. He stood on stages built for spectacle and played with the precision of someone who had spent three years in the audience learning what the greats looked like from the cheap seats. A North Carolina native who first arrived in Louisiana in 2002, Walker carries the particular authority of a musician who chose to stop playing and then chose to come back. That interruption — the silence, the watching, the slow realization that the instrument wasn't something he did but something he was — gives his playing a weight that goes beyond technical command. Rolling Stone has called his work "soaring." NPR has called it "energetic." DownBeat observed that his songs tell stories rather than serving as launching pads for virtuosity. The New Orleans Best of the Beat Awards placed him alongside Nicholas Payton, Jon Batiste, and Terence Blanchard. None of those descriptions are wrong, but none of them quite capture the thing that happens when Walker picks up the horn: the sound of someone who knows what it costs to put it down.

bradwalker.me

**Matt Booth** decided he was a bass player before he owned a bass. He was in middle school in Pittsburgh, and his friends wanted to start a rock band, and somebody had to hold the bottom, so he volunteered. He loved it immediately — the way the instrument lived in the foundation of everything, felt but not always heard, holding the architecture together while everyone else got to be the skyline. He played electric bass through high school and into college at Duquesne University, where he was earning the first of two music degrees, when he heard Charlie Haden playing upright on Ornette Coleman's *Science Fiction*. That was the turn. Haden's playing didn't announce itself — it moved underneath the music like a current, melodic and patient and completely essential. Booth picked up the upright and never looked back. In Pittsburgh, he became the kind of musician a city builds around without quite noticing it's happening. He played in an Americana band, a David Lynch tribute act, a tango group, an Asian-jazz fusion ensemble — four wildly different worlds, each requiring a different version of the same instrument. He taught at Carnegie Mellon. He co-founded the Space Exchange, a weekly showcase for creative and improvised music that ran for five years and became one of the city's essential rooms. He freelanced with Sean Jones from the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. He did everything a serious musician does in a mid-size city that respects its players, and then his friends and teachers started telling him the same thing: you should be in New Orleans. He moved there around 2015, and the city absorbed him the way it absorbs anyone who shows up ready to work and willing to listen. Within a few years, Booth had become one of its most omnipresent bassists — co-leading the piano trio Extended with Oscar Rossignoli and Brad Webb, fronting his own quartet Palindromes with Brad Walker on saxophone, touring nationally with John "Papa" Gros, and appearing on bandstands at Snug Harbor, Tipitina's, and the Spotted Cat with a rotating cast that read like an index of the city's finest: Aurora Nealand, Irma Thomas, Johnny Vidacovich, Leo Nocentelli, Big Chief Monk Boudreaux, Cyrille Aimée, Anders Osborne, Steve Masakowski. OffBeat Magazine nominated him twice for Best Bass Player. He played Jazz Fest, French Quarter Fest, Ottawa, Burlington, South by Southwest. The rooms kept getting bigger, and his approach stayed the same — serve the music, listen harder than you play, trust the people around you. In 2023, Booth did something unexpected. He left New Orleans for Durham, North Carolina. But leaving a city doesn't mean leaving its musicians, and his debut album of original compositions, *Sun Prints*, released in 2024 on Ears & Eyes Records, was built from the relationships New Orleans gave him — Rossignoli on piano, Steve Lands on trumpet, Sam Taylor on tenor, Peter Varnado on drums, all of them players who had shaped the scene Booth helped sustain. The record moves from straight-ahead swing to funk to meditative ballad, spanning the same kind of ground Booth has always covered: everything, as long as it's honest. Charlie Haden is still in the DNA — the patience, the melodicism, the conviction that the bass is a voice, not just a pulse. But what Booth has built on that foundation is entirely his own: a career defined not by the spotlight he's stood in but by the rooms he's helped build and the musicians he's made better by standing next to them.

mattboothmusic.com