Every atom in your body was forged in the belly of a dying star. The calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood, the carbon threading through every strand of your DNA — all of it cooked at temperatures beyond human language, scattered across the void, and reassembled over billions of years into something that walks into a bar on a Tuesday night and listens.
Sanders, Boyd, Page & Hall are four collections of stellar debris who have chosen to spend their brief window of consciousness making original music together. Not playing songs. Not running repertoire. Building something in real time from the raw material of attention, instinct, and decades of accumulated craft — compositions that didn't exist before these particular particles arranged themselves around instruments in this particular room.
Sanders' guitar refracts melody through a prism of everything from Sharrock to Hartford, bending light no one else can see. Boyd's reeds and winds carry frequencies rooted in the red clay churches of South Carolina, now orbiting through dimensions his EWI opens like airlock doors. Page — a man who has averaged 275 gigs a year since the mid-nineties — provides gravitational pull, the low-end mass that keeps the whole system from flying apart. And Hall, four decades deep into a conversation with rhythm, treats percussion less like timekeeping and more like particle physics — breaking beats into smaller and smaller pieces until something fundamental reveals itself.
Their compositions move through jazz, soul, free improvisation, Americana, noise, and territories that don't have names yet. The through-composed pieces give way to groove explorations that give way to the kind of collective free fall where nobody knows what's coming next and everybody trusts the landing. It's the sound of matter becoming aware of itself and deciding to swing. Little Jumbo curates evenings like this one — where the creature on the wall watches over a room full of exploded stars who showed up to experience something unrepeatable. This is free. Always free. The universe doesn't charge admission to witness itself in motion.
Featuring
The house in Orangeburg, South Carolina, was a frequency spectrum unto itself. The Isley Brothers and the Manhattan Transfer and Dolly Parton and Mozart — all of it moving through the same rooms, all of it landing in the ears of a kid from Queens, New York, who had been transplanted to the Lowcountry and was trying to figure out which signal to lock onto. His mother had graduated from Jamaica High School of the Performing Arts, and she made sure Will and his siblings sang. Gospel was the...
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....
Jay Sanders grew up in Nashville, which means he grew up understanding that music is labor — that behind every song on the radio is a session player who showed up on time, read the chart, and made someone else's vision real. But the Nashville that shaped Sanders wasn't the one on Broadway. It was the one in practice rooms and living rooms where Reggie Wooten talked about fundamental vibration and sacred geometry and the Music of the Spheres, where the instrument became a doorway into...
Before Alan Hall played his first drum lesson, he played concerts. He and his sister would turn on the radio and perform for the neighborhood kids in San Jose — no instruments, no training, just the instinct that sound was meant to be shared and that sharing it required an audience. His mother was a pianist who sang and taught. His grandparents were Spanish dancers on the vaudeville circuit. His father's father wrote pop songs. The family had been in the business of moving people's bodies for...
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