Improv hour

The Dave Matthews Band show how to experiment

by Craig Thorn

When I was a kid, I went to Genesis and Yes concerts, where I discovered that rock songs were an opportunity to experiment with blues, jazz, and folk variations during long improvisational sets. Progressive rock wasn't quite the mainstream, and so the audience was prepared for experimentation. Listening to 20-minute songs by Pink Floyd ultimately turned me on to the "alternative" music of artists like Alan Parsons.

The Dave Matthews Band don't enjoy the luxury of an audience expecting wild excursions -- they're too mainstream. Their fans come prepared to hear what they heard on the albums. So when I went to DMB concert at the FleetCenter a week ago Tuesday, I expected most of the songs to resemble what I'd heard on their current album, Crash, and Under the Table and Dreaming (1994, both RCA). I was pleasantly surprised. The band decided early on to stretch themselves and their audience, coaching their fans in how a decent outfit can improvise on power-pop charts.

Drawing from Crash for the first five songs of the set, they opened with "Tripping Billies," a trademark DMB piece that relies on modest variations from violinist Boyd Tinsley and sax player Leroi Moore on a four-note riff over Stefan Lessard's simple but funky bass line. With each song, the band played more adventurously, leading us by the hand from hit radio to rootsy prog. Frequently, they quoted their own songs during improvisations. You could hear the melody from "Tripping Billies" during a jazzy break in "Lie in Our Graves." In "Ants Marching," singer/guitarist Matthews's lyrical shifts between smooth melody and punchy lines actually echoed the musical shifts between folksy rock and funky blues in "Lie in Our Graves." The DMB drew us in with familiar signposts, like their frequent brassy unison bridge segments, which were geared to set up a section of free-form jamming.

The light show also worked as a primer: cueing everyone to the knottier pyrotechnics of Tinsley, Moore, and drummer Carter Beauford, bathing the crowd in psychedelic patterns during solos by Tinsley and Moore, and mimicking Carter Beauford's explosive foot work with flashing spotlights. The band teased the crowd with false climaxes and explicit allusions to Cajun, jazz, and blues. After creating a safe musical world with "Tripping," "Two Step," and "Lie," they played "#41," a complex arrangement for Matthews's voice free of brassy punctuation and those three or four-note unisons. During "Recently," the Tinsley and Moore solos became more elaborate. Beauford toyed with flamenco rhythms during "Dancing Nancies." Moore developed a structured jazz solo during "Jimi Thing" that invited Lessard to work left and right hand in an intricate bass line. By the time they got to "Crash into Me," the band were playing with their own formulas.

They always returned to the safe haven of the funky backbeat and Matthews's guitar riffs. But on "Drive In Drive Out," they did an elaborate chart in unison while Beauford responded with a run across the crashes and toms reminiscent of Steve Gadd's solo on Steely Dan's "Aja," his bass drums rolling the power-pop train far from the frat house. Lessard opened the closing cover of "All Along the Watchtower" with fret work à la Alphonso Johnson. So maybe the way Genesis and Yes led me to Alan Parsons, some kid in the DMB audience last week heard something that will turn him on to Sparklehorse or Sunny Day Real Estate.