AVAS
AVAS: The Acoustic Vibration Appreciation Society
Jay Sanders – Guitar | Jason Krekel – Fiddle | Andy Pond – Banjo | Will Boyd – Clarinet & Flute | Zack Page – Bass | Alan Hall – Drums
The Story
AVAS existed before anyone named it. It was a frequency humming in the background, a vibration looking for instruments willing to carry it.
Jay Sanders, Jason Krekel, and Andy Pond arrived in the mid-1990s from Nashville and Boone, carrying the progressive acoustic fire that Béla Fleck, Jerry Douglas, Edgar Meyer, Sam Bush, and Strength in Numbers had lit, and immediately began building the infrastructure of a scene. The three were the backbone of the early Snake Oil Medicine Show, writing music together that would become the foundation of AVAS' original compositions and showcasing them on legendary stages such as Be Here Now.
Sanders joined Acoustic Syndicate in 1997, spending a quarter century with one of the foundational bands in progressive acoustic music, touring the country and playing Bonnaroo, Farm Aid, and every stage in between. Krekel went on to co-found the Firecracker Jazz Band, one of Asheville's most beloved dance outfits, and The Krektones, a surf-rock trio that channels Link Wray through the mountains. Andy Pond continued to spread the message of universal peace and music with Snake Oil, and his compositional prowess carried him all the way to Carnegie Hall.
Born when Green Acres was still the mythical incubator for progressive acoustic music, AVAS became a vehicle for the question Earl Scruggs first posed when he started bending the rules: what happens when you stop telling acoustic music where it can't go? Sanders, Pond, and Krekel were the shared visionaries and composers who manifested what had been an informal musical society into a recording and touring act, releasing their self-titled debut on Steve Metcalf's Little King Records in 2000. For Sanders, Metcalf was more than a label head. He was a true friend, inspiration, and patron, someone whose belief in adventurous music gave artists permission to follow the signal wherever it led. The Mahavishnu influence ran deep enough that AVAS was cited in Walter Kolosky's Power, Passion and Beauty: The Story of the Legendary Mahavishnu Orchestra. Instrumental, improvisational, through-composed, steeped in bluegrass vocabulary but reaching toward Bill Frisell, Scandinavian folk, Raymond Scott, and the cosmic fusion of Sun Ra and John McLaughlin, AVAS was the sound of Asheville's early progressive acoustic scene, and remains one of its most adventurous.
Twenty-five years later, AVAS has reconvened with a modernized lineup that expands the original vision with polyrhythms and voices the trio have gathered through a quarter century of musical evolution. Will Boyd brings clarinet and flute steeped in the soul and spiritual traditions of the American South, frequencies channeled from someplace deep and ancient. Zack Page, whose connection with Sanders and Pond stretches back over thirty years to the Boone days of the 1990s that gave birth to this project, anchors the low end with a gravitational pull that holds the whole thing in orbit. Alan Hall, a percussion philosopher with four decades behind the kit, converts kinetic energy into bridges between the earthbound and the ethereal.
This is music rooted in bluegrass vocabulary but pushing into the territory that Earl Scruggs opened up for everyone who came after: the territory where tradition isn't a boundary but a launchpad, where the fundamental vibrations are older than any genre, and where a banjo and a guitar can still open doorways that nobody knew were there.
The Members
Jay Sanders: Guitar
Jay Sanders grew up in Nashville, which means he grew up understanding that music is labor, that behind every song on the radio is a session player who showed up on time, read the chart, and made someone else's vision real. But the Nashville that shaped Sanders wasn't the one on Broadway. It was the one in practice rooms and living rooms where Reggie Wooten talked about fundamental vibration and sacred geometry and the Music of the Spheres, where the instrument became a doorway into something older and stranger than the music business. Later, in Knoxville, Sanders spent extended time with Samurai Celestial, the former Sun Ra drummer, absorbing a cosmology in which sound is not entertainment but architecture, a way of organizing the invisible.
He moved to Asheville in 1996 and almost immediately began building. He joined Acoustic Syndicate in 1997, staying for a quarter century as the band became a foundational force in progressive acoustic music, playing Bonnaroo and Farm Aid and touring the country more times than anyone kept count. He played bass for Donna the Buffalo. He co-led the E.Normus Trio, whose debut drew All About Jazz comparisons to John Zorn's Naked City. Along the way, he played with Ornette Coleman, Béla Fleck, Fred Wesley, Sam Bush, Bernie Worrell, Big Chief Monk Boudreaux, and Kirk Joseph. He composed for the ETHEL string quartet. He scored independent films. He played guitar and bass across 47 states and six countries.
In 2024, he released Evanescent, his solo debut: seven original compositions and a tone poem dedicated to the Voyager spacecraft. The German press called it a work of astonishing range. When Hurricane Helene struck the mountains in 2025, Sanders responded the way a composer responds. He wrote Sinfonietta Helene, his first symphonic work, which premiered with the Blue Ridge Orchestra.
Sanders co-owns Little Jumbo, which USA Today named one of the Best Bars in America for 2025. He curates the Monday night jazz series, leads a quartet every Tuesday with Boyd, Page, and Hall, organized Asheville's inaugural Improvisational Music Festival, and serves on the board of URSA Asheville. He is, in other words, doing exactly what he has always done: constructing rooms where music can happen, and then standing inside them with his guitar, making sure it does.
Andy Pond: Banjo
Based in Asheville, banjoist Andy Pond brings a fearless and eclectic voice to the five-string. Known for his work with Snake Oil Medicine Show, the Pond Brothers, CX-1, and Futureman's Black Mozart Ensemble, Pond fuses Appalachian bluegrass traditions with funk grooves, world music influences, and electronic enhancements. His hybrid picking style, mixing three-finger, single-string, and frailing, creates a unique palette of rhythm, drive, and melody.
When Pond enrolled at Appalachian State University in Boone, his brother George and George's then-wife Caroline joined him to form Snake Oil Medicine Show, coining the term "slamgrass" for their colorful and kinetic update on old-time string music, inflecting it with deep pockets of jam-inspired groove, shades of rockabilly smoothness, and most famously, comfortable reggae rhythms. Their experiences traveling to Jamaica to learn reggae music and incorporating it with bluegrass created a sound that North Carolina, Boone and Asheville, proved the perfect place to experiment with.
Beyond Snake Oil, Pond became a founding force in AVAS alongside Sanders and Krekel, a progressive acoustic group that released their self-titled debut in 2000, blending newgrass with influences ranging from Bill Frisell and Mahavishnu Orchestra to Scandinavian folk legends. These days, this teacher and musician focuses on fostering creative learning environments, promoting world peace through music and art, and attending to forgiveness and acceptance. From Boone student to Asheville institution, Andy Pond proves that the best banjo players don't just pick strings. They pick philosophies.
Jason Krekel: Fiddle
Jason Krekel attended Jimmy Buffett concerts as a baby, strapped to his father Tim's back while dad played lead guitar, absorbing the songwriter, studio, and publishing scene of Nashville before he could even speak. His father, the beloved Louisville musician and songwriter Tim Krekel, handed him a guitar at 14 with zero pressure attached. Krekel took lessons with Jay Sanders, and the two played their first gig together at Hume-Fogg High School in the 11th grade.
After heading to Boone for college, Krekel dove headfirst into bluegrass, old-time, and whatever else had strings attached. Around 1995, he and Sanders both joined Snake Oil Medicine Show, and by the late '90s, the two had formed AVAS with Andy Pond and a rotating cast of collaborators. Krekel's three-decade career has amassed a vast repertoire spanning roots and garage rock to jazz and bluegrass, including the 2004 BlueBrass Project, which paired Asheville roots musicians with New Orleans brass players including Trombone Shorty and members of Rebirth Brass Band.
Krekel doesn't just play music. He designs album covers and posters through his Hand-Cranked Letterpress, has appeared on David Letterman, recorded comedy songs for LaZoom tours, and co-founded the Firecracker Jazz Band. His latest musical project, Bam-A-Lam, launched in 2023. As he puts it: "Everything I've done in my musical life has informed how I play now." A musician and visual artist based in Asheville, Krekel proves that the most interesting careers spiral outward like vinyl grooves, each rotation revealing new collaborations, new sounds, new reasons to make music with actual hands.
Will Boyd: Clarinet & Flute
Multi-reed instrumentalist, composer, and educator Will Boyd hails from the soul sax tradition of Eddie Harris, Hank Crawford, David "Fathead" Newman, King Curtis, and Johnny Hodges. Originally from Queens, New York, by way of Orangeburg, South Carolina, Boyd was playing in professional R&B bands before he turned eighteen.
After becoming a staple of the Columbia, South Carolina, music scene, working alongside drummer John Blackwell (Prince, Justin Timberlake) and trombonist Fred Wesley (James Brown), a chance encounter with saxophonist Patrick Langham pulled Boyd to Knoxville. He enrolled in the University of Tennessee's jazz studies program, where he studied with Jerry Coker, South African free jazz visionary Zim Ngqawana, and pianist Donald Brown of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. Coker later called Boyd a modern musician steeped in tradition.
Boyd has performed with Leslie Odom Jr., Doc Severinsen, Wycliffe Gordon, Regina Carter, Jeff Coffin, the Four Tops, John Beasley's Monk'estra, the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra, and the Harry James big band. He has appeared on recordings with Nicholas Payton, Chris Potter, Jeremy Pelt, Eric Reed, and Russell Gunn. He played Big Ears in Knoxville and Peter Barakan's It's Magic in Tokyo. He now teaches at UNC Asheville and Warren Wilson College, directs the Contemporary Jazz Ensemble of Asheville, and performs weekly at Little Jumbo in the Jay Sanders Quartet. Three solo albums, Live at the Red Piano Lounge, Freedom Soul Jazz, and Soulful Noise, document a musician who channels frequencies from someplace deep and ancient.
Zack Page: Bass
Zack Page has been performing as a professional bassist since the early '90s, and his connection to Andy Pond goes back even further. The two grew up practically inseparable, and when Zack's father Pete gave him a bass and Andy a guitar for their 12th Christmas, a musical bond was forged that would stretch across three decades. After graduating summa cum laude in music from UNC Wilmington, Page's work with jazz ensembles, theater companies, and the cruise industry took him to all 50 U.S. states, the Caribbean, Australia, South America, Europe, and the Far East. While in college, he played the prestigious Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.
In jazz settings, Page has played and recorded with Billy Higgins, Delfeayo Marsalis, Cyrus Chestnut, Marvin Stamm, Eddie Daniels, and Babik Reinhardt, the son of Django Reinhardt. Following stints in Los Angeles and New York City, Page relocated to Asheville, where he averages 275 gigs a year as arguably the most versatile upright and electric bassist in Western North Carolina. As trumpeter Justin Ray puts it: "Zack has the hallmark of every great musician: he makes everyone around him better."
Alan Hall: Drums
Alan Hall's grandparents were Spanish dancers on the vaudeville circuit. His grandfather wrote pop songs. The family had been in the business of moving people's bodies for generations. Hall just happened to pick the instrument that does it most directly.
A professional drummer for more than forty-five years, Hall started on professional bandstands at thirteen with a San Jose Mexican-American party band called Los Unicos. By seventeen, he had won the Percussive Arts Society's eight-state drum set competition, judged by Carmen Appice, who praised the musicality and called it refreshing. He studied at Berklee College of Music before finding his way to Alan Dawson, the legendary drummer and educator, studying privately for two years through Dawson's rigorous program of rudiments, tunes, and twenty-five-minute warm-up meditations.
Hall went on to record at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley and the Record Plant in Sausalito. He played with Paul McCandless (Oregon), Russell Ferrante (Yellowjackets), pianists Taylor Eigsti and Geoffrey Keezer and Ed Simon, and Lee Konitz. He worked Cirque du Soleil at Madison Square Garden, Teatro Zinzanni in San Francisco, and the national tour of Wicked. He taught at Berklee for seven years and continues teaching at the California Jazz Conservatory and the Jim Beaver School of Music near Asheville. He founded the Asheville Jazz Collective and composed for Ratatet, a sextet featuring bassoon, trombone, and vibraphone. He plays Tuesday nights at Little Jumbo with Sanders, Boyd, and Page in a quartet that treats every set as an act of mutual discovery.