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.