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Umphrey's McGee Let Fans Conduct Jams at 'S2' Shows
Spinner * October 14, 2009
by Benjy Eisen

Umphrey's McGee have always prided themselves on their uncanny ability to completely improvise entire passages of music onstage, changing things up radically from night to night as if they were as much magicians as musicians. It's not smoke and mirrors but they do have a set of hand signals and loose game plans to guide them if they should stumble, and it hasn't often led them astray. But now they're putting the fate of those jams into the hands of their fans. Kinda. The band has announced a band and fan experiment called "The Stew Art Series" (or "S2" for short), whereby lucky fans get to "conduct" the band, in a way.

It works like this: fans submit their instructions for the direction of the jam (such as a color, adjective or even a concept like, for example, "stumbling home drunk") via their Umphrey's Mozes mobile interface. The band's soundman, Kevin Browning, sorts through them in real time and projects them onto a screen for the band to then interpret musically, mid-jam.

"The improvisational elements of our shows have always been one of our favorite parts about playing together, and we think the audience feels that way too," keyboardist Joel Cummins explains to Spinner. "That's the inspiration for the S2 series. It's also a great way for us to stay on top of our chops." It's gutsy, for sure, but also undeniably cool.

Umphrey's took the S2 for a test drive on October 3 in Milwaukee, Wis. in which fans directed the band to play music that sounded like the soundtrack to "a bus ride in Jamaica" and "drinking pina coladas in a hurricane," amongst other things. The next S2 show will take place Oct. 24 in Portland, Ore. with more dates to be announced shortly. While ticketed separately, the S2 experiments will happen before the band's regularly scheduled show at the same venues on the same nights. We would tell you that Umphrey's current tour runs through Dec. 31, but it's not really relevant -- when aren't they on tour?