There is a specific gravity to a room when someone who has played with Stan Getz and Chet Baker and Jim Hall and Benny Carter picks up a bass in the corner of a cocktail bar. Not reverence, exactly — something more like tidal pull. Steve LaSpina has spent four decades as one of New York's most quietly essential bassists, a musician whose note choices carry the compressed weight of every stage he's stood on since leaving the dance band tradition of Wichita Falls, Texas, for the South Side clubs of Chicago at fifteen years old. He doesn't announce lineage. He simply plays, and the lineage announces itself — in the warmth of his tone, in the unhurried architecture of his walking lines, in the way his compositions move between jazz and classical impulse as naturally as breathing shifts between waking and sleep. A Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Jazz Fellowship recipient and longtime faculty member at William Paterson University, LaSpina has appeared on over seventy-five original recordings and shared stages at the North Sea and Umbria Jazz Festivals. Tonight he brings all of that accumulated gravity to Broadway Street.
Leading this trio is Tim Fischer, a guitarist and composer now rooted in Asheville after years spent absorbing the musical ecosystems of Los Angeles, St. Louis, and coastal South Carolina. Fischer holds a doctorate from USC and spent nearly a decade on faculty at Coastal Carolina University, but the academic credentials only sketch the outline. The interior is stranger and more interesting — a musician equally fluent in bebop harmony and modular synthesis, someone who has presented research on Miles Davis's first quintet and also builds sound from voltage-controlled oscillators. His recent work with Brian Felix's organ trio on Level Up, recorded at Drop of Sun Studios right here in Asheville, captures that duality: jazz precision and electronic curiosity orbiting each other without collision. Fischer writes music that lives in the spaces where these impulses overlap, where a guitar line might feel like it was composed at a desk or discovered in the hum of a patch cable.
Behind the kit sits Ryan Ptasnik, a drummer whose biography reads like a novel someone would shelve under magical realism. Trained in the band rooms of Pinedale, Wyoming, Ptasnik has performed Kazakh poetry settings at the base of Pik Lenin in Kyrgyzstan on a stage built from two pickup trucks, toured Central Asia with Norwegian saxophonist Mette Henriette, and recorded with the experimental group Moyindau. He is also the drummer for Asheville's Grateful Dead tribute Clouds of Delusion and a regular presence supporting artists across the local scene. That range — from improvised mountain stages in Central Asia to Monday nights on Broadway — isn't contradiction. It's the mark of a drummer who treats every context as worthy of his full attention and every rhythm as a doorway rather than a destination.
Three musicians. Three wildly different paths converging in a room where the creature watches from the corner and the art on the walls doesn't quite make sense. This is what Little Jumbo's curated Monday series does best — places you close enough to hear the conversation between instruments, close enough to feel the accumulated miles in every note. And it doesn't cost you a thing.
Featuring
Born in the dance band DNA of Wichita Falls, Texas, Steve LaSpina transformed family musical heritage into a New York City bass legacy that spans four decades and reads like a who's who of jazz history. From Chicago's South Side clubs to Manhattan's most prestigious stages, LaSpina's upright and electric bass have provided the rhythmic backbone for legends including Stan Getz, Jim Hall, Mel Lewis, and Chet Baker. This is bass playing as musical archaeology, where every walking line connects present moments to past masters, where each note choice reflects decades of studying with giants like Ray Brown while forging his own path through the modern jazz landscape. LaSpina doesn't just play bass—he translates the entire history of American music into four-string conversations, proving that the best rhythm section players aren't just timekeepers, they're time travelers who can make any room feel like it's connected to every jazz club that ever mattered.
Dr. Tim Fischer exists in that rarified space where USC doctoral precision meets street-level groove, where European touring experience fuses with American jazz DNA to create something entirely his own. This guitarist-composer-educator doesn't just play jazz fusion—he reimagines what happens when classical technique meets electronic experimentation, when rock energy collides with bebop sophistication. From Los Angeles studios to St. Louis classrooms to his current faculty position at Coastal Carolina University, Fischer has built a career on proving that the most interesting music happens at the intersection of seemingly incompatible styles. His collaboration with Brian Felix on 'Level Up' and his co-authorship of 'Jazz Guitar Duets' demonstrate a musician who understands that teaching and performing aren't separate activities—they're two sides of the same creative coin, each informing the other in an endless cycle of musical discovery.
Ryan Ptasnik honed his drumming skills in Pinedale High School band classes in Wyoming, a foundation that would eventually carry him from garage bands to performing at the Opera and Ballet Theatre in Shymkent, Kazakhstan. This jazz-trained drummer has become a versatile force in multiple musical worlds, from his work with the experimental group Moyindau—where he performed Kazakh poetry settings at the base of Pik Lenin in southern Kyrgyzstan on a stage constructed from two pickup trucks—to anchoring the Asheville-based Grateful Dead tribute band Clouds of Delusion. Ptasnik's musical journey includes traveling to Central Asia with pianist Alex Kreger, where they presented music in Tajikistan with Norwegian saxophonist Mette Henriette, and recording with Moyindau—a group that blended jazz with arrangements of popular and folk tunes from Macedonia and Tajikistan. Now based in Asheville, he maintains an active presence supporting local artists like Whitney Monge and Rick Cooper at venues like Highland Brewing, while also serving as the rhythmic backbone for Batdorf & The Brother Wolf. From Wyoming band rooms to makeshift mountain stages in Kyrgyzstan to Asheville's vibrant music scene, Ptasnik proves that the best drummers don't just keep time—they become the adaptable foundation that allows wildly diverse musical visions to flourish, whether channeling Jerry Garcia's spirit or bringing Kazakh poetry to life through rhythm.