Somewhere deep in the fossil record, long before jazz had a name or a country to be born in, there was already a creature built for improvisation: the pterosaur, all leather and hollow bone, riding thermals it could not see and trusting the air to hold its weight. Little Jumbo has quietly adopted one as the patron spirit of this particular Tuesday, and it glides in good company. On July 14, Jay Sanders convenes his quartet in the corner of the bar with guitar and a rack of effects, joined by Will Boyd on the full family of reeds, Zack Page on bass, and Ryan Ptasnik in the drum chair. Four players, one very old impulse: to leave the ground without a map and discover, somewhere mid-flight, that the air was structured all along.

Sanders came up understanding music as labor and then slowly unlearned it into something closer to cosmology, absorbing fundamental vibration from Reggie Wooten and sound-as-architecture from Sun Ra's own drummer. Boyd hauls every reed he owns to every gig, not to show range but because each horn says a thing the others cannot; the soprano, sweetest and most difficult of them, tends to sound like a cry sent up across a very long distance. Page is the bassist the whole region calls, somewhere near 275 nights a year, a man who makes everyone around him better mostly by refusing to play a single careless note. And Ptasnik, who has drummed in a Wyoming band room and on a stage built from two pickup trucks at the foot of a peak in Kyrgyzstan, brings the one trait every winged reptile needs to survive: the instinct to read whatever the wind is doing and keep flying.

Admission is free, the way it always is here. The set belongs to the curated series Sanders runs through the week, and it unfolds in a room where Wade Asa's horned, four-eyed creature keeps watch from one corner while the pterosaur presides over the other, and the art on the walls politely declines to explain itself. There is no cover, there never is; you just pull up a seat and let deep time do its gliding overhead.

Featuring: Jay Sanders - Guitar and Effects, Will Boyd - Sax, Flute, Clarinet, EWI, Zack Page - Acoustic & Electric Bass, Ryan Ptasnik - Drums