Rick Dilling drove from Pennsylvania to the mountains of North Carolina in the summer of 1973 to play golf. He thought he wanted to be a teaching pro. That first week in Boone, a jazz pianist hired him for a gig, and he never went back home. More than fifty years later, he is still in these mountains, still playing, still the person every bandleader in western North Carolina calls first.
The origin story matters because it tells you something essential about how Dilling operates — he follows the sound. He grew up listening to his father's records without knowing the names on them: Miles Davis, the Modern Jazz Quartet, JJ Johnson, Dave Brubeck. He loved the Tijuana Brass. He loved Basie and Ellington and Goodman and Woody Herman. Then, at twelve, a drum teacher handed him a Buddy Rich album, and the entire instrument opened up. Later it was Tony Williams, Grady Tate, Ed Thigpen, Joe Morello, Mel Lewis — each one revealing a different dimension of what a drummer could be inside the music rather than on top of it. He enrolled at Appalachian State University, graduated with a degree in Music Industry Studies, and then spent the next thirty-eight years on the jazz faculty there, teaching applied drum set to generations of students — including Shirazette Tinnin, who went on to lead her own band in New York City and credits Dilling with helping her get her first kit.
The list of people who have trusted Dilling behind them reads like a survey course in American jazz: Clark Terry, Herb Ellis, Phil Woods, Ernie Watts, Houston Person, Joe Temperley, Billy Taylor, Tony Monaco. He played with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra and the Nelson Riddle Orchestra. At the Brevard Music Center, he shared a stage with Louie Bellson — set up his drums right beside the legendary drummer's kit, played the first half of the concert, then watched Bellson play the second. When the crowd demanded an encore, Bellson called Dilling back out for a drum battle on "In a Mellow Tone." Bellson could have buried him. He didn't. That's the kind of respect Dilling's playing earns.
Saxophonist Todd Wright calls him "Mr. Tasty" — a nickname that captures something technical language can't quite reach. Dilling listens. He supports. He does what the music needs before anyone has to ask. Vocalist Wendy Hayes put it more precisely: he is there for the music first, not for himself, and that selflessness is what elevates him from player to artist. In Asheville, where he has been based since 2011, he is the drummer for the Asheville Jazz Orchestra — where he now serves as Artistic Director — as well as the Michael Jefry Stevens Trio, the Richard Shulman Group, the Todd Wright Quartet, and the Wendy Jones Quartet. He leads his own big band, Time Check, a tribute to the music of Buddy Rich that brings the full-throated roar of a seventeen-piece ensemble to stages that rarely get to feel that kind of air displacement.
Dilling is the kind of musician a city builds a jazz scene around without always realizing it. He's on the bandstand five nights a week, anchoring sessions at the White Horse in Black Mountain, at Highland Brewing, at Biltmore Estate, at every room that takes the music seriously. He has shaped the sound of this region not just through performance but through decades of teaching — sending students out into the world with the understanding that swing is not a style but a commitment, and that the drummer's job is to make everyone else sound like the best version of themselves.