Umphrey's McGee Halloween at The Fillmore, Oh the Horror!

Posted: 12:00 AM, Mon, Oct 29 2007

Apparently a couple of years ago on Halloween, at a venue called, "Martyrs," in Chicago, Umphrey's McGee played a show where all the members were dressed up as Satans, except for keyboardist Joel Cummins, who dressed up as a nun. It was quite chaotic and the audience didn't know what to make of it, until the band played The Doobie Brothers', "Jesus is Just Alright," with Cummins singing, "Jesus, he's my friend." At that point, the band and audience alike became fairly confident that everything was going to be okay.

So, what is Umphrey's McGee gonna be for Halloween this year--the year in which they will be playing live musical songs at The Fillmore in Denver? Wouldn't you like to know? Wouldn't we all like to know? But, you see, to deduce the answer to that question, one would have to understand who Umphrey's McGee the band was, and what drove it to want success so badly that it would stop at nothing. What was its childhood was like? Was it raised by a pack of retired Seeing Eye Rottweilers and taught to play music in the Jungles of Capoeira? Probably not. According to Wikipedia, Capoeira isn't even a real place, it's a style of dance that was created by enslaved Africans in Brazil during the 17th Century, and in which, basically, people pretend to fight. But that's neither here nor there.

One thing we do know, is that the Halloween show at The Fillmore will not be your average Umphrey's show by any stretch of the imagination. "We've got a bunch of things up our sleeve for this particular show, just to make it a little bit different and more enticing to come check out than our normal show," said Umphrey's' guitarist Jake Cinninger in a phone interview before their show in Lawrence, KS earlier this month. "We're trying to add a lot more visual aspects to our show, like big projection screens with all these horror classics or scenes, particular scenes that we're going to be playing to," elaborated, Cinninger.

And of course, this horror scene jam idea plays to one of the band's most notorious strengths: the guided improv. "We'll come up with specific bits of music that we'll write prehand, and that will be synced up with a particular horror scene or gore scene and we'll try to emulate what's on the wall," explained Cinninger. So in other words, Umphrey's McGee will be creating a live, partially improvised soundtrack to a horror film collage.

Now, there is some debate among fans who have come across the music of Umphrey's McGee by way of the jam scene. The topic of this debate is this: can Umphrey's McGee truly be considered a jam band, or are they disqualified from that title due to the fact that their jams are "guided" by prewritten chord progressions and/or or by the intricate language of cues that they use to communicate with one another about the direction in which the jam should be steered, while the jam is in progress.

"What most bands think of as improv is you sort of close your eyes and go into your own world," said Cinninger. But Umphrey's takes the opposite role. "We all keep our eyes on each other and if everyone's watching, we can make the right motion towards the next section of music properly rather than everyone fall flat on their face. So, it's all about being aware inside that sort of freedom. You still gotta be aware inside the freedom zone of an improv." And this is something that jam purists have taken issue with. "We've always been scorned on the fact that, ‘oh, they're not really jamming. They've got all these cues happening.' But the reason why we do that is because we all have A.D.D... and we want it to sound good. I'm not into sitting on one key and spacing out for a half an hour. We kind of said, let's go in the opposite direction of that ideology, and make improv sound written....and sort of sound premeditated. So, I think that we're kind of scratching the surface on that a little bit more. And each year that goes by, we get better at figuring that problem out: how do we make improv sound written? And that's kind of been the jist of it all," explained Cinninger.

Umphrey's McGee doesn't seem to be overly concerned with the outcome of the debate, or whether or not they are accepted as full-fledge members of the jam scene. In fact, when they list their influences, they are more likely to talk about Frank Zappa, or Genesis than The Grateful Dead or The String Cheese Incident. In fact, they credit the concept of guided improv to Frank Zappa. "Yeah, we definitely pull that from the Zappa camp. He was the guy that pretty much started that," credited Cinninger. "he would just put the guitar down and direct the band. And stop them on a dime, or tug on his ear, which that means play Reggae on the next bar."

In addition to the guided improvs, the horror scenes, and other goodies that the band will be handing out to the people that come trick-or-treating at the door of the Fillmore on Halloween, fans should come prepared to receive a fair helping of cover songs, which are another thing for which the band has acquired a reputation.. "When covering a song, Umphrey's makes a genuine effort to become the musicians whose work they are playing," said Cinninger in a way that makes it sound almost as though Umphrey's were possessing the bodies of the members of whatever band they cover. "If we are going to do a cover, we try to emulate what is on tape, or on the particular CD as close as possible, because, you know, when we listen back to our version of it, we want to make sure it doesn't fall short of the original. So we really try to hone in on guitar tones and drum tones and the way that these particular musicians are feeling the music, and we try to emulate that."

If you are still wondering what Umphrey's McGee is going to be for Halloween, fine. Your persistence has paid off. The answer is, Umphrey's is going to be...At The Fillmore. Endjoy.

Anyone interested in enjoying Umphrey's McGee's Halloween show at The Fillmore in Denver is welcome to catch a ride on The Basics Fund's party bus. It's leaving from 14th between Arapahoe and Canyon right behind the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Arts in Boulder at roughly 5 PM. $20 suggested donation. Includes round trip and on board keg (21 and up). All proceeds go to pay for artists' health insurance. Please see www.thebasicsfund.org for details. RSVP required. Call Dustin at 303.579.6555. Don't drink and drive...drink and let Dustin worry about the rest.