brad walker quartet

New Orleans doesn't export its musicians lightly. The city absorbs players the way river silt absorbs water — slowly, completely, until the person and the place become difficult to separate. **Brad Walker** moved there in 2011 after three years of not playing saxophone at all, three years spent teaching math in Brooklyn and sitting in the audience at the Village Vanguard every night, watching the greats and wondering if he'd made a permanent mistake. He hadn't. Within a decade he was one of the most sought-after saxophonists in the Crescent City, leading Sturgill Simpson's horn section on SNL and the Grammys, recording seven albums of his own, earning DownBeat's four-star seal and Best of the Beat nominations alongside Nicholas Payton and Jon Batiste. His most recent record, *A Sliver of Catharsis*, is the work of a musician who has stopped trying to prove anything and started trying to say something — tenor and alto saxophone woven through electronic effects, compositions that explore spiritual searching and inner stillness with a band that breathes as a single organism. **Matt Booth** was part of that organism. The bassist appears on *A Sliver of Catharsis* and on Walker's Palindromes project, and the two share the kind of musical history that only accumulates through years of playing the same rooms in the same city at the same hour. Booth built his career in Pittsburgh — Duquesne degrees, a five-year weekly creative music showcase he co-founded, adjunct work at Carnegie Mellon — before New Orleans pulled him south in 2015. He became omnipresent: co-leading the piano trio Extended, touring with John "Papa" Gros, playing alongside Irma Thomas and Johnny Vidacovich and Big Chief Monk Boudreaux. OffBeat nominated him twice for Best Bass Player. His own debut of original compositions, *Sun Prints*, arrived in 2024 after he'd made the unexpected move to Durham, North Carolina — proof that leaving a city doesn't sever the roots you put down in it. **Al Sergel** comes from Charlotte, where he has spent three decades building a career that refuses to recognize the borders between sacred and secular, jazz and pop, the bandstand and the sanctuary. A band director's son who got into jazz by reading liner notes and researching drummer discographies at the library, Sergel studied at Florida State and Berklee before joining the Chad Lawson Trio, touring with singer-songwriter Jason Upton, and sharing stages with Bob Mintzer, Jim Snidero, and Ricky Skaggs. His own music — born from iPhone voice memos recorded in late-night places after gigs, fragments a friend convinced him were actually songs — draws from Beck and Tycho as comfortably as from Pat Metheny, and his *Sleepless Journey* hit number one on the NACC jazz charts. **Alex Taub** holds the piano chair. Born in Silver Spring, Maryland, trained at East Carolina and recently returned from McGill University in Montreal with a master's in jazz, Taub has been a fixture of Asheville's music community since 2013 — the kind of pianist whose touch and harmonic sense make him one of the most called musicians in a city that doesn't lack for options. He now teaches at East Tennessee State, and his duo recording *Six Feet Apart* with pandeiro master Scott Feiner captures the breadth of his musical vocabulary: Brazilian rhythm meets jazz harmony meets the restless curiosity of a player still discovering what the instrument can do. Four musicians from four North Carolina cities — a saxophonist whose New Orleans credentials run as deep as anyone's but who was born in this state, a bassist who left the Crescent City for Durham, a drummer who anchors Charlotte's jazz scene, and a pianist rooted in Asheville's. Little Jumbo's curated Monday series has a way of making these convergences feel inevitable, as though the room on Broadway Street were quietly pulling the right people toward it at the right time. This one's free.