jack wilkins’ tenor conclave

The name nods to a 1957 Prestige date that put Coltrane, Mobley, Zoot Sims and Al Cohn in a room together and let the tenors work out their differences in real time. Jack Wilkins revives the premise for a Monday night in Asheville, trading horns with fellow tenor Dylan Hannan over a rhythm section that has no business being this deep for a free show on Broadway. Wilkins is the Director of Jazz Studies at the University of South Florida and a saxophonist whose career has carried him from the Canadian Rockies to Swedish jazz clubs to Grammy-nominated orchestral sessions. Hannan, a Florida-raised multi-reedist, plays saxophone, clarinet and flute with the quiet discipline of someone who studied composition on the side and never stopped listening like a composer. Put two tenors across from each other and something interesting almost always happens, the conversation shifting from harmony to rhetoric, each player's phrasing sharpening against the other's. The rhythm section is a small event of its own. Andy Page on guitar and his twin brother Zack Page on bass have been playing together since their father handed them their instruments on their twelfth Christmas, which is to say they hear each other in a way that takes most musicians decades to approximate. Justin Watt, a veteran of the Glenn Miller Orchestra and a fixture of the Asheville scene, holds it all down from the kit.