justin ray with the brian felix organ trio

The Hammond B3 does something to a trumpet that no other instrument can. It surrounds it. A piano leaves space — the notes fall and decay, and the horn floats in the silence between them. But an organ breathes continuously, fills the room with a living harmonic field that the trumpet has to push through, lean into, ride on top of like a ship on a swell. When **Justin Ray** steps in front of the Brian Felix Organ Trio, the physics of the room change. The Leslie speaker rotates. The drawbars shift. And a trumpet that has filled Madison Square Garden and the Sydney Opera House finds itself inside something more intimate and more demanding — a sound that asks not how loud you can play but how honestly. **Brian Felix** came to the organ through the piano, studying with Kenny Barron at Rutgers before co-leading OM Trio, the San Francisco jazz-rock group that toured nationally from 1999 to 2004 and shared stages with Tower of Power and Umphrey's McGee. After earning his doctorate — his dissertation explored what happens when rock becomes jazz, a question his playing continues to answer nightly — he landed at UNC Asheville, where he now teaches everything from jazz theory to courses on the Beatles and the Grateful Dead. His double-LP *Level Up*, released on his own Slimtrim Records, captures the working trio in full flight across twelve original compositions that move from straight-ahead swing to New Orleans funk to folk-gospel without ever losing the thread. The album is a map of everywhere Felix has been, and every drawbar setting is a pin in it. **Tim Fischer** and **Evan Martin** have been Felix's trio for long enough that the unit operates on something closer to intuition than arrangement. Fischer — the USC doctorate, the modular synthesis explorer, the guy who co-authored *Jazz Guitar Duets* and also builds sound from voltage-controlled oscillators — brings a harmonic vocabulary that meets Felix's organ voicings in unexpected places. Martin, who came to drums through years as a guitarist, listens like a melodic player and responds to phrases rather than patterns. Together, the three of them generate a sound that is simultaneously tight and open, controlled and combustible. Adding Ray to this equation is like introducing a weather system. His trumpet — shaped by two decades in Michael Bublé's touring band, by the Los Angeles scene with Peter Erskine and Dave Weckl, by Clifford Brown and Lee Morgan and a patience that is entirely his own — enters the organ trio's atmosphere and changes the pressure. He knows how to use silence the way most players use volume. He knows when to lead and when to disappear into the harmony and let the organ carry the weight. This is a musician who chose Asheville over arenas, who composes extended works and sings and pushes the standard of what a Monday night can hold, now standing inside a sound built from drawbars and a rotating speaker and the accumulated trust of a working band. Four musicians. One room on Broadway Street where the art doesn't quite make sense and the cocktails are worth the trip on their own. Free, because that's how Monday nights work at Little Jumbo.