by rick grant rickgrant01@comcast.net
What: Umphrey’s McGee
Where: The Sunset stage of the Langerado Music Festival
When: 12 am - 3 am on Saturday March 8th
Formed in 1998, Umphrey’s McGee has traveled serious mileage across the land, performing its sonic improvisational sound for the masses. The group moved to Chicago in 2003 and changed drummers. Since then, it has been an intact sextet. UM has been compared to Frank Zappa meets Steely Dan with a dash of Little Feat’s influence in its fusion of rock and improvisational music.
EU spoke with Ryan Stasik from his home in Chicago.
“We have charts, songs, grooves, and motifs from which we improvise. We love playing live and strive to make each concert worthy of using it as a live recording. We have a guy who records every show and makes a best-of CD so we can use it to get new ideas. Brendan Bayliss, our guitarist, and Jake Cinninger, our keyboardist and synthesizer wizard, are our songwriters, but we all make contributions to the songs with new ideas that we develop.”
However, UM emerged in the mid–2000s as a wildly popular live band that plays long memorable shows to their fanatical fans, who have bought the group’s albums to the tune of platinum sales. UM accomplished an unusual milestone by becoming commercially successful without compromising their sound. When the nouveau punk movement hit in 2005, UM was still the same band it was in 2003. This proves that there is room in the big time music biz for many genres. In fact, UM’s fans have been growing as the youth movement is exposed to quality music as opposed to screaming angst alt-rock, which may or may not have any credibility.
“Our live shows are an ever-changing musical experience, which is very liberating for us. We never play the same song the same way twice, which makes it interesting for us. Sometimes songs turn into new songs and so on. Our live music is constantly changing into new shapes and forms as we play. Of course, we feed off each other’s live ESP when we are in the groove,” Ryan said.
UM’s latest album, Live at the Murat is a memorable live recording. In fact, I prefer live recordings as opposed to studio works. UM’s flow of ideas and spontaneous compositions through improvisations are inspired by the feedback they are receiving from their audience. I was blown away by the groups’ music.
Ryan went on to say that they are working on a new studio album built up from multi-tracking, which is fine, but it will never be as inspired as the group’s live performances.
Article Published in the 03-08 Issue of EU Jacksonville
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