In many ways Kang discovered Bassnectar and brought him into the rock/jam scene. How did they first meet?
Oh, they’ve known each other for a long time. Kang and Travis would go out to Burning Man and Lorin (Bassnectar) has been king of Burning Man for a while. So you know, this is like, pre-2000—I think since 1997 they’ve kind of known him. And him and Kang were good friends. A lot of credit has to be given to Kang for bringing Bassnectar onto the festival scene because he ended up opening for String Cheese a little bit. And I remember I had this conversation with Lorin, at Sea of Dreams or something like that, and he’s like, “How do I make kids do that?” You know? Because of the way people got down so hard on one of the String Cheese bluegrass breaks. I just remember Lorin’s quote exactly” “I want to make them do that!” So it was a pretty cool evolution of how that came about.
And just as a side note, after that Kang and Bassnectar thing, we actually started the Jam Room on Jam Cruise. I think it was in the Blue Lounge or something like that on the old ship. After that was done playing, me and Travis and I think Jamie Janover were still all awake and we’re like, “Well, fuck. Now what do we do?” I forgot who mentioned it necessarily but it’s like, but my gear was over in this ‘jam room area’ so we said, “Let’s turn it on. Let’s turn the PA on and get going.” And that’s when [Jam Cruise’s now trademark] Jam Room started. Me and Travis just set up and went for it. But on the way to it we felt like we were carrying a flag to it like, “Everyone go to the jam room!” You know, it’s like 4 AM or something. “Let’s go!” And then guys started coming down and then the rest of the week it was like more and more, it just became the thing.
It was a seminal night for the scene.
Kind of, yeah yeah! Definitely for Jam Cruise so, that was cool. That’s a pride factor. I went into the Jam Room for a bit this year [on Jam Cruise]. They had some really good drummers in there—I really like Jam Cruise a lot, especially things like the Jam Room. Just meeting some good people because, usually, you’re watching them from the stage. I’m usually kind of shy about the whole thing—I don’t like to say, “My name’s Jason. You should know me, let’s jam” And it always feels weird. I just like to watch for the most part. But you know, with the Jam Room it feels like it has that openness that you can just get up there and play.
String Cheese Incident reunited in 2010 and went on their first tour in a number of years this past fall. Now that you all have your own solo projects, do you feel like String Cheese has managed to find its identity, instead of being pulled between all these different styles?
Exactly. It’s kind of one of the reasons why I ended up joining String Cheese [in the first place]. They knew I could play the traditional percussion stuff—the pop—and the kind of Herbie Hancock-style of percussion. But when I joined they also asked me if I knew about programming and electronic music because by that time it was 2004. Bassnectar had already opened for String Cheese a couple of times, and Sound Tribe was definitely having their own thing solidified—electronic music was already coming into the scene and String Cheese was playing some of that. Sound Tribe and the Disco Biscuits were probably the first evolution of that whole deal, where a jamband got a DJ to open for them.
As we started incorporating it into String Cheese, I was finding my role in the band and I would say, “I’ll do whatever you guys want.” They would say, “Let’s get some electronic programming on this jam” and I was good to go. As EOTO started doing its thing, we didn’t do it as much with String Cheese—we kind of just went with the flow. It was like, “do we really want to incorporate any more electronic music? It’s this new fresh thing and we can’t pull it off.” And Kang, for the most part, initially, when were hitting some new jam, would say, “Let’s do some programming on it.”
But as the evolution of that has gone along, it’s like a new toy to play with. Like, “Let’s try to play with it.” And as the evolution of that went on and, like you said, everyone did their own other projects, we don’t necessarily put it out there to be like, “Oh, let’s do programming on this.” But there’s kind of a group collective feeling that we should do something different with this song or that song, and programming definitely played into all of that. If you listen to Kyle’s last two records there’s a ton of programming on it because he got all Beck-a-fied, you know? And so it’s spread pretty evenly around.
And then we have a new song out called “BollyMunster.” It is a new, Indian-influenced song but it totally came from [bluegrass purist] Billy Nershi playing this line and stuff like that and being like, “What can we do? Can we do something different with it?” And I’m like, “Well, I used to play Bachata music and I did a CD of that.” So we kind of added this Bollywood music to this idea of Billy’s. So I was like, “OK, I’ll get some music and we’ll listen to it. And let’s arrange to, like, kind of like ‘Valley of the Jig,’ where it’s a new song based on a traditional, real song.” But we added our own arrangement to it and did something completely different to it.
In our String Cheese feature for Relix last year, you mentioned that one new style the band had been toying with since reuniting was African music. I think several members of the band cited that as an example of how the band is still experimenting with different styles, despite playing less shows together.
Yeah, I think one of the interesting and kind of difficult parts about it was that when we throw an electronic jam onto established music that the fans already love and hold dear, they didn’t like it because they were used to a certain way hearing that song. So when we placed some new programming on top of it a lot of String Cheese fans would say, “Noooo! They’ve abandoned us!” Or something like that…
But I think with the new stuff and new arrangements people respond better because they never heard that song in another way. A song like “BollyMunster” really was introduced the right way as opposed to an organic song that people felt like we turned into this techno thing.
Do you have a favorite show from String Cheese Incident’s recent Roots Run Deep tour?
There’s some of that but I’m always trying to bring the A-Game every night. But, Philly stands out as really, really strong for some reason. It just felt like everything clicked so hard on, both in terms of the on-stage vibe and how the crowd was into it as well as the venue. It was one of those things where it felt like it all came together.
Also, the Chicago nights felt really good. I mean, there were a lot of really good things about it. Something about the St. Louis show really stands out only because the power went out and it was something different that we were just like, alright let’s make this stuff go, you know. And that ended up being a lot of fun because we never get to do anything like that.
True percussion jam?
Yeah, yeah! Exactly. And uh, so lots of, you know, little stand out things. But probably a whole complete show maybe Philly might have been the one for me.
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