michael rabinowitz quartet ft. steve davidowski

The bassoon is the oldest voice in this room. Not **Rick Dilling**, who has been playing these mountains for over fifty years. Not **Steve Davidowski**, who was making records with the Dixie Dregs before most of the cocktail menu's ingredients were invented. Not **Zack Page**, who has averaged 275 gigs a year for three decades and counting. *The bassoon itself* — an instrument whose lineage stretches back centuries, whose double reed carries the memory of court music and cathedral acoustics and the low murmur of orchestral pits — is the eldest presence on stage tonight. And **Michael Rabinowitz**, the only musician in jazz history to build an entire career around improvising on it, is the one who taught it to speak this language. What makes this particular quartet so striking is not just the caliber of each player, though the combined résumé could fill a small library. It's the convergence of four musicians who each, in their own way, chose to step outside the expected frame. Rabinowitz walked away from the orchestral tradition to blow bebop through a double reed. Davidowski walked away from the Dixie Dregs at the height of their momentum to play saxophone and keyboards with Vassar Clements. Page has spent a lifetime refusing to choose between gypsy jazz and heavy metal, between cruise ships and mountain hollows. Dilling drove to North Carolina to play golf and accidentally became the rhythmic foundation of an entire region's jazz scene. None of them took the obvious path. All of them ended up here. Rabinowitz brings his own compositions to the bandstand — music that moves with a composer's intention and an improviser's restlessness, shaped by decades inside the Charles Mingus Orchestra and collaborations with Wynton Marsalis, Joe Lovano, Chris Potter, and Anthony Braxton. Davidowski meets him there with the harmonic instincts of a musician who cut his teeth alongside Pat Metheny and Jaco Pastorius at the University of Miami and never stopped absorbing new vocabularies. Page and Dilling lock in underneath with the kind of telepathy that only comes from years of shared bandstands — Page building his architectural bass lines, Dilling doing what he has always done, which is make every musician around him sound like the best version of themselves. This is a quartet assembled from four different compass points of American music — New York loft jazz, southern fusion, Appalachian roots, big band swing — meeting in a room on Broadway Street where the strange art watches and the cocktails are worth lingering over. The bassoon will fill the space the way it always does: with a sound that is simultaneously ancient and utterly new, comic and tender, deep enough to feel in your sternum. Free, as always, because that's how Monday nights work at Little Jumbo.