The sign says “Hopeful.”
For Kyle Hollingsworth, the Hammond B wizard from String Cheese Incident, “Hopeful” sounds a lot like a mash-up of War’s “Low Rider” and “Cisco Kid,” two songs that didn’t really conjure aspiration until Hollingsworth defined his interpretation.
Moments later, Matt Butler scribbles on his dry-erase board and raises the sign to the band.
“Reflective.”

Blown Away: Jennifer Hartswick finds the groove.

Bay Area guitar guru Steve Kimock takes this one and leads the Everyone Orchestra into a rich, ambient landscape of elongated chords and quaking riffs rife with Latin overtones. Mandolin maestro Jamie Masefield picks up on Kimock’s Latino spice and soon his eight-string mandolin is ringing with flamenco as Motet drummer Dave Watts picks up the tempo.

It’s just another night for the Everyone Orchestra, a rotating troupe of master musicians led by scrawling conductor Butler, the rhythmic backbone of string band Hot Buttered Rum.

Over three nights at Denver’s Quixote’s True Blue last May, the Everyone Orchestra hit just about every musical genre out there.

This time there were eight, with Jennifer Hartswick bellowing on-the-fly compositions with a trumpet that spooned perfectly with Kimock’s reflective fretwork. Boulder’s Jamie Janover worked the hammered dulcimer and percussion, lending a tangy thump to the deep-end, which was aptly manned by Motet bassist Garrett Sayers. Together, the group mastered its transitioning segues, a skill barely grasped by most of today’s nascent “jam bands.”

Butler runs the show with his chicken-scratch sign and frantic waving. Sometimes, he plays the mime, pulling jams out of his musicians with an invisible rope. He does the same with the crowd, using his sign to cull well-timed screams, stomps, moans and even an occasional “Thud!” His notes to the band reveal his inclinations toward in-the-moment expression, like “Explode!” or “Follow Kimock” or the head-scratching “Techno-Raga.”

There is never a plan and no Everyone Orchestra show sounds like another. No one on stage knows where they are headed, but they are very much able to get there.

“Nothing really ever comes up twice,” Butler says. “It’s about letting the musicians have space to just kinda rip it up and put them on the spot.”

Over the span of three shows at Quixote’s, the eight-top meandered from groove to groove, developing a playful mood that seeped into every note. The freewheeling nature of the EO party could not find a better home than Quixote’s, where Denver’s Jay Bianchi has corralled his one-time music venue empire into a single house o’ fun. Bianchi’s enviable collection of Dead-and-Deadish concert posters now blankets the main room. A second stage room often hosts set-break play and a new outdoor patio stage completes a three-stage venue.

The Ringleader: Matt Butler is the heart of Everyone Orchestra’s improvisational storm.

The three shows at Quixote’s unearthed countless spectacular moments with each musician given plenty of range to roam. Friday’s heavy-hitter was Masefield, who started out tentative but after an hour or so of backdrop noodling came on hot with raging licks that swerved between bluegrass, honkeytonk boogie, techno and Arabesque world-beat. Saturday’s show saw a more harmonic sound, as the musicians coalesced in more determined, yet still open-ended, directions, all anchored by Kimock’s smooth, laid-back slide sound. Sunday’s acoustic show was an intimate encounter that felt like friends jamming in the living room.

Sometimes a theme or chant emerged, like Friday night’s “Walking Arm in Arm,” a vocal duet with Butler and Hartswick that evolved into a sort of instrumental duel between Masefield and Hartswick as it stretched through two distinctly different songs.

As is common for most Everyone Orchestra outings, the Colorado concerts fed the charity Conscious Alliance, the 8-year-old Boulder-based group that works with jam musicians to distribute food in needy communities. Over the years, Everyone Orchestra has stirred its listeners to donate cash, toys and food to a host of causes. The idea, says Butler, is to add some sense of purpose to the wandering musical party.

Add in a first-night show at Hodi’s Half Note in Fort Collins and this Colorado version of the Everyone Orchestra played eight sets and more than 14 hours of where-are-we-going music in late May. Every experiential lick was unrehearsed and never to be heard again; a journey that definitely bests any destination. •

Jason Blevins writes for The Denver Post. He is a strange dancer, but that has never stopped him.

Everyone Orchestra alumni:
Umphrey McGee’s Brendan Bayliss and Andy Farag, String Cheese Incident’s Michael Kang, moe.’s Vinnie Amico, DJ Logic, Melvin Seals, Scott Law, The Flecktone’s Futureman and Jeff Coffin, Phish’s Jon Fishman and Papa Mali.

Unbearable Noise
Jam Bands? Here’s how I define them: Mountain disco—a bunch of highly caffeinated bluegrass matched with indecipherable lyrics and hard-driving African drum beats all engineered to give ski-snowboard-mountain bike-kayak bums (i.e., white people) some kind of tribal backbeat to sway around in an open field like some synchronized bed of seaweed.

I mean, that should be a good thing, but there’s all that patchouli in the air. And all those 20-minute solos that go nowhere when just a dozen well-picked notes would do. And there are all those mindless mandolin-picking fests and 20 dudes in a row with the same Ben & Jerry’s t-shirt on playing air guitar, saying, “That was tasty, bro.”

There’s also the fact that not one of them, Phish, New Monsoon, String Cheese Incident or the Colfax Chocolate Eclairs, seem capable of writing a lyric to save their steel-string souls.

I mean, I hear Phish singing, “Bag it, tag it, sell it to the butcher in the store,” and I think, “Man, that’s just Vermont’s version of ‘The Hustle.’”

Which I guess means that I should take a time-out here. Because I am calling out Phish, the jam-band sacred tofu cow.

Look, I love the way American music makes you feel. I think country is white man’s blues, rock and roll is the backbone of freedom and soul music is the sexiest sound the world has ever known. I also think those last Grateful Dead shows at Red Rocks were among the best concerts ever played, and Phish was my most ‘transcendent’ college show.

I was amazed how easily they transitioned from Metheny to Zeppelin and John Lee Hooker. But the fact that the audience was bouncing around on trampolines the whole time should have been my first clue. I mean, how high do I have to get my heart rate to enjoy the show? For me, that whole hula-hooping, expanding your mind, getting a tan and fitting in an extended aerobic workout is the worst part of the whole jam band deal.

I’ll get my exercise in the mountains, thanks. All that blue sky will expand my mind just fine. Then I’ll grab a beer and listen to the band at the bar.
—Peter Kray

Transcendent Experience
I hated the Grateful Dead when I was in high school. I was a headbanger who spurned all the sunshine and rainbows associated with Jerry, dancing bears and anything tie-dyed. I wasn’t buying it. My older stepbrother and I shared a room, and he was in a metal band named Manifest. They partied, hung out at the jam room, and kicked ass for fun. I started writing my own teen-angst ridden songs.

My stepbrother was known around high school for belting out primal screams in the hallway. He wore Megadeth t-shirts with the sleeves and armpits cut out, and had a hot rocker chick for a girlfriend—zip-up-the-back stonewashed jeans, hair-sprayed, turned-up bangs and all.

Naturally, I followed my stepbrother’s lead and formed my own band, the Cannibal Poets. I was the lead singer, and we ripped up on cover tunes like “Whiplash!” by Metallica and “Children of the Grave” by Black Sabbath. The Cannibal Poets played a couple live “shows” in church basements and coffee shops, inspired a mosh pit or two, and eventually went the way of so many great bands and broke up. It wasn’t drugs or women that split us up, but graduation from high school and the beginning of my transcendent jamband experience.

Phish changed my life. I went away to a small college in North Adams, Massachusetts, started hanging out with some suburban hippies, and saw my first Phish show at Lake Placid, New York in 1995. My mind was blown before I walked in the Olympic Center’s doors. Here was a culture that existed outside my comprehension—and I seemed to fit right in. Street vendors selling veggie burritos out of dirty coolers? Wow, I’ll take two! At the time, I was a snack-e-tarian surviving off the cafeteria cereal bar, baked potatoes and pizza. And look at the wasted people laughing and lying in the grass unafraid of security, ants or cigarette butts? Amazing! Got room for another?

Then the show started, and people with dreadlocks and patchwork pants were dancing in the aisles and singing along. There were no mosh pits, but lots of group hugs, high-fives and hemp necklaces thick as my forearm.

The music was in perfect sync with a blinding light show. Phish was the perfect combination of high-energy rock and improvisational roll, complex and simple at the same time. I was hooked.

At their best, segues in music—like “Mike’s Song-I am Hydrogen-Weekapaug Groove” by Phish—are a mirror image of life. Like my segue from headbanger hippy-hater to kind, vegetarian bro, or angry Masshole to mellow transplant living in Colorado.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love my metal music. I’ve just eased up some on the hate—and I just may have Phish to thank for that.
—Mike Horn

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