Elsewhere with Umphrey’s

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By T. Virgil Parker

When I got the advance copy of Umphrey’s new disk I knew my day was pretty much shot. Based on my previous experience of the band, nothing was going to get done while I was listening to this. Defusing that much sound is almost an ordeal, but in the sense of an extreme sport or a rite of passage. Listening to Anchor Drops, their last album, built up a highly distracting metaphor in my mind: A nuclear music box from another dimension. Raw notes are dumped in by the truckload, spidery mechanical octopus arms sort them. Impossible music comes out the other end. I’d like to get my hands on one, but sadly, metaphors take a long time to get on the market.
Meanwhile, their new disk: Safety in Numbers, would have to suffice. One thing which I had forgotten about Umphrey’s McGee, is that your expectations about them have very little to do with their musical objectives. They managed to create a sound without much of a precedent in their body of work. This new music is so smooth you can almost hear ice tinkling in Black Velvet.  You detect a distant nod to Steely Dan, a flashlight shown down some dusty corridors of Jazz, but hanging like a net over the entire set of songs is an essence that seems to serve both as the contour that contains the music, and the music itself: The essence of silk. They will no doubt continue to devastate audiences with their penetrating live music, but no one could have easily predicted this pocket of serenity hiding behind Umphrey’s elaborate contortions.
You can imagine that I was rather anxious to have a few words with Umphrey’s formidable keyboard player, Joel Cummings.
T. Virgil Parker: The first thing that was evident when I got my hands on your new disk is that Umphrey’s has high expectations of their fans.
Joel Cummings: I think that’s what people really want. I don’t think they just want to hear a verse, chorus, verse chorus kind of song. We do have a couple songs on there that are closer to that format. I think it’s much better to listen to something that you don’t process the first couple times your hear it, you don’t necessarily know where it’s headed.
TVP: Your last disk was like the seventies had just continued without the intervention of the 80’s. This one is coming from a completely different headspace. That takes a certain amount of bravado.
JC: It’s more a matter of us following our own muses. Where we’re at and what we feel is our sound in that particular time.  It’s not like we put things out and call that our sound, how it has to be.
Right now we’re at the stage of working on new material. That stuff will probably be out in a year and a half. I don’t think we consciously choose to go in one direction. We wrote about 24 tracks for this disk. When we chose what went on it wasn’t just a matter of finding the strongest material, but finding the strongest material that goes together. I see an analogy being that you have a basketball team and some players are really strong. Maybe your strongest player isn’t your starter, but you have to find a combination that works well.
TVP: You have a completely different set of expectations in the studio than you do from a life performance.
JC:   When we’re in the studio we focus on songs. When we’re re in a live setting, we’re doing something that includes the audience. The improvisation is a huge part of the live show. That’s what we like to do. We use the songs as springboards for that. Sometimes, but not as much, it works the other way around.
TVP: Progressive music is so precision-based, it’s almost completely antithetical to Jam. What how do you maintain that?
 JC: They can happen together, it’s just that in the Jam world you’re not used to hearing the two things together. One of the things that keeps things tighter live is that we have a lot of visual cues we use back and forth to indicate where somebody sees an idea going and we can use that as a group. That creates a lot of the tightness that you’re talking about. Those are two things that we work on: The idea of creativity within improvisation and the idea of tightness. Always working on both of those and sometimes they work together. Sometimes there’s a situation where we’re playing something a little bit tighter as an exercise and working on that and we come across an improvisational aspect.
TVP: Umphrey’s is showing signs of being the next big thing in the genre. How does that feel?
JC: We’re sort of grateful to be where we’re at. At the same time, we’ve kept doing what we’ve always been doing. We communicate together and play whatever we think is our best material.
TVP When it comes to building a song, do you take it from the ground up, or do you start passing ideas around. What’s the compositional process like?
JC: For the most part we try to get everybody’s take on something different in there and to be inclusive about how we do things.
Songs start lots of different ways. People will bring ideas from home, and we’ll try to put ideas together. We’ll have an entire song written by one person, or a couple people will get together and write something, or even in the live setting where we’re creating something on the spot and it ends up a composed tune that we use.
That’s one of our goals in improvisation, to come up with something that seems previously composed as opposed to a loose improvisation that’s more noodley.
One really funny review of a show that we saw said that we didn’t improvise at all, and it was a night where there was a ton of improvisation. We were able to trick somebody into believing that our jams were previously composed.
TVP: I went to an Umphrey fan site and told them I was going to do this interview, and got a ton of questions. So I decided to pull a few of them out.
This is from PKSConrad: Are any of the new songs going to be played on the road in February?
JC: New material will be played in February, but I’m not sure what, because we’re still in the process of working that out. We’ll have two to four new pieces of music that we’ve been working on over the past six months. That stuff is not on the new album. The stuff that’s on the new album, I would guess, is going to get played in April, when the album comes out. We want that stuff to be fresh and a surprise when people start hearing it. There are five or six songs that people never heard before that are on the album.
TVP: Willtotte wants to know-this is rather cryptic for me- Who was in the Gorilla suit?
JC: I don’t know if I should give that one away, I know who that is. Well, OK. It was a couple of our good friends, Barry and Chris. They were excellent Gorillas.
TVP: TheOtrane wants to know: How do you pick your set lists?
JC: It’s a combination of what we want to play, and we look back and make sure we haven’t played a song in a given area the last three of four times we were there. We have a big enough catalog of songs that we also make sure we don’t play the same stuff the night before. We all get into working the set lists on different days, so we each have our own preferences for different songs. There’ll be songs that I like to play that nobody else likes to play and I’ll try to get them in there. It doesn’t always happen, but I can always try.
TVP: Gunnes842- this is a good question-asks: Do you want to be as huge as possible? If so, are you worried about the baggage and the drama that comes with the territory?
JC: That’s not something that’s really too much in our control. We don’t really make decisions like: What’s going to make us as huge as possible? To get to where we are now was definitely a goal and I think as long as we can continue to produce music and be happy with it and support ourselves, that’s something that was ultimately our goal. We’re almost there right now, which is pretty cool. At this point it takes on a life of its own. We’re just going to keep doing what we’ve been doing and we’ll see where it goes. We’re very happy to be where we’re at.
TVP: And, from JimmySnucka, When the [Insert expletive] are we going to get the G song?
JC: 1998. That’s when you’re going to get it. You’re going to have to do a little Back to the Future action to get there.
TVP: The average Umphrey’s song has about as much content as you find in a typical album these days.
JC: Thank you!
TVP: You go to a lot of different places to gather that content, how do you bring it all together and make it Umphrey’s?
JC: One of the things that is essential to making disparate sections of music sound related is how you get from point A to point B and how you get back there. That’s something that’s permeated our songwriting and makes it a lot easier to create things you’d think were impossible to relate to one another. Sometimes those things are poly-rhythms and have to do more with rhythmic aspects, sometimes things are thematic. You can manipulate a theme or a melody to traverse both sides of that. I think that’s something that we’ve worked on, and maybe that contributes to the idea that you are relating to as our sound. That’s a huge part of that and without that things could sound a little disjointed. I think occasionally we do fall into that trap. We try to avoid that as much as possible and make things work that are going to change things up and be interesting to the listener yet somehow find a thread to tie them together.
TVP: With a bunch of really aggressive musician on stage, do you ever find yourselves trying to blow each other off the stage, or is it just total cooperation?
JC: Some nights are better than others, but I think for the most part we have the feeling that any one of us can take the lead in any set or any night. When somebody’s having a good night we can feel that and we give that person the ball, That’s one good thing about all the visual cues that we have. And, if someone’s having a bad night they can pass the ball. That’s the kind of teamwork that helps us build each other up. It builds a kind of trust in how we create things on state.
TVP: Do you think you’re going to lose any other members to the medical profession? That’s becoming an epidemic in the Jam scene.
JC:  We started the trend. Now it’s the thing to do, but I don’t foresee it happening to us again. But then, you never know.
TVP: Is there anything under the radar that you know about that I don’t know about yet?
JC: At this point we’re gearing up for the album release and how we’re going to do that. We’re looking at another year of touring, and hopefully making good music.