will boyd & kevin spears

The saxophone has been speaking since the 1840s. The kalimba has been speaking for centuries longer. What happens when you put the two of them in the same room, with two musicians who have each spent a lifetime finding new things to say through their instruments, is not something that has a name yet. Will Boyd is a multi-reed instrumentalist, composer, and educator who carries the soul sax tradition of Eddie Harris, Hank Crawford, and Johnny Hodges in his blood, and then pushes well past it. He has added the EWI, the electronic wind instrument, to his arsenal, not as a replacement for the acoustic horns but as an extension of them, another voice in a conversation that keeps expanding. His résumé reads like a map of modern American music: Doc Severinsen, Wycliffe Gordon, Regina Carter, Leslie Odom Jr., the Four Tops, John Beasley's Monk'estra, recordings with Nicholas Payton and Chris Potter. He directs the Contemporary Jazz Ensemble of Asheville, teaches at UNC Asheville and Warren Wilson College, and performs weekly at Little Jumbo. Boyd has described his own aesthetic plainly: he likes space, and he likes soul. Those two values, held in tension, are the engine of everything he does. Kevin Spears has spent his life reimagining what is possible on the kalimba, the traditional African folk instrument, incorporating his lifelong fascination with electronics and science fiction in an Afrofuturistic way, weaving horns, bass, violins, synths, drums, and world percussion into a one-man ensemble that operates on its own frequency entirely. He builds some of his own instruments. The Cirque du Soleil musical director has described his performances as drawing audiences into "his unique yet universal world." AfroPop Worldwide has said his playing would make Stevie Wonder smile. These are two musicians who do not traffic in the expected. Placing them together is less a concert booking than an experiment, a question posed to the room: what do centuries of African resonance and the American soul horn tradition sound like when they find each other, with no script and no ceiling? Little Jumbo's weekly series exists precisely for nights like this one.