“I remember we saw their name on the preliminary round lineup and assumed they were probably pretty good,” keyboardist Rob Marscher says of the first time he heard about his future band before a Boston Battle of the Bands contest his high-school group was also a part of in 1997. “The band name makes us cringe a bit now but back in the ‘90s, ‘groove’ music was a new term.”
At the time, high-school friends John Hall (bass), Brendan McGinn (guitar, trumpet, vocals), Andrew Keith (drums), Dave Adams (alto saxophone) and Ben Groppe (tenor saxophone) had been already performing together around their native Wellesley, Mass. for a few years, honing in on a singular sound that mixed their relatively new interests in funk and jazz with a range of then-current second-wave jam and alt-rock influences. Addison Groove Project won that competition, Marscher’s band came in second and the keyboardist ended up joining the nascent outfit. As Marscher notes, though funk is now a signature stylistic element often associated with the jamband movement, the Northeast groove scene was still in its infancy at the time AGP coalesced. “I vividly remember going to Newbury Comics on Route 9,” Adams says. “I must have been a sophomore [in high school]. I asked the person that worked there what a good funk album was. She handed me a P-Funk album [Greatest Hits (The Bomb)]. Popped it in the CD player right when I got home. My life was changed forever.”
AGP continued to perform regularly as its six members attended various colleges throughout New York and New England, growing into true “weekend warriors” on the road and building a sizable catalog of originals and covers. As they began to fold in some of the early ‘00’s ascendant indie influences, the group also began headlining a mix of notable venues—including New York’s Wetlands and Bowery Ballroom, Vermont’s Higher Ground and Boston’s Paradise and Middle East—and scored choice spots as marquee festivals like Gathering of the Vibes, Berkfest and the third-annual Bonnaroo, where Trey Anastasio Band horn players Dave Grippo and Jen Hartswick sat in. Along the way, the musicians shared the stage with heroes like Maceo Parker, Trey Anastasio and Jon Fishman, as well as peers and friends like Lettuce, Dispatch, Matisyahu, Uncle Sammy, Umphrey’s McGee, Benevento/Russo Duo, The New Deal and Assembly of Dust.
However, shortly after Hall graduated from college in 2003, he was diagnosed with cancer, eventually passing away a year and a half later, just a few days after his 25th birthday. The remaining band members soldiered for a while, with Marscher covering the bass parts on his keyboard; they released a final album, Waiting Room, which they worked on with Pete Carini, of Phish fame, at Anastasio’s Barn, before eventually parting ways in 2007.
The band turned in a pair of reunion gigs in 2013 but have been largely inactive ever since, though Marscher continues to perform with Matisyahu and as part of Star Kitchen. And, in the coming weeks, the quintet will come together for shows at Cambridge, Mass.’s The Sinclair on March 29 and New York’s Drom on April 5. For the dates, Adams’ teenage daughter Ruby Golden Tiger, who achieved some viral fame during the pandemic and performed with Karina Rykman, will cover Hall’s parts on bass. Here, the group discusses their first performances in over a decade and looks band on Hall’s legacy.
Let’s start with a little history for those who may not be familiar with AGP and its backstory. How did the band originally come together in middle and high school and evolve into the classic sextet, with Rob on keys?
Rob: The origins of AGP go back to middle school in John Hall’s basement in Wellesley, Mass. in the ‘90s. John, Brendan McGinn and Andrew Keith started jamming—John on bass, Brendan on guitar and Andrew on drums. Brendan performed on trumpet in the jazz band at school and John and Andrew were on bass and drums. That’s where they started performing with Dave Adams and Ben Groppe.
The band had friends with older siblings that were seeing Phish shows, like New Year’s 1992 at Northeastern University in Boston. Brendan, Ben and Dave started writing original material—they were playing at school dances in the school cafeteria and other parties and events. There was a big Boston high school Battle of the Bands competition that started in 1994. I think it started as a spin-off of Boston’s Rock ‘n Roll Rumble competition. Some members of Aerosmith were judges along with the Boston Globe music editor and DJs from the radio station WBCN. Addison Groove Project entered the competition in spring of 1997 during their junior year of high school. The band didn’t really have a name since they added Dave and Ben on horns, but they needed to pick a name to submit their application for the competition. They liked “Groove Project” as being descriptive of what they were trying to do—learn how to groove like the JB’s and P-Funk. So they were brainstorming a word to stick in front and “Addison” was suggested. Addison is John Hall’s father’s name. That’s whose basement the band had been practicing in. He was the reverend at an Episcopal church in Wellesley, Mass. and he’d later be the subject of our song “The Reverend.” Not surprisingly, I think John thought the name was a little weird, but he was out-voted.
I grew up a couple of towns over from the rest of the band. I had a band in high school called Roadside Attraction. We were in the high school battle of the bands in 1996 and came in second place. We entered again in 1997 and that’s how I first encountered Addison Groove Project.
My band came in second place again with Addison Groove Project winning first place. We were both performing at a concert a few weeks later. My band was breaking up because we were graduating and going to college. There was some equipment backstage, and I heard Brendan practicing “The Landlady” by Phish. I saw Phish for the first time at Great Woods in the summer of 1995 and was pretty obsessed at that point. I had transcribed a bunch of their songs, including “Punch You In The Eye,” so I played along and we got to talking. During their set, my keyboards were still up on the stage, and I sort of “bum-rushed the stage”—as our friends in Lettuce would say—on their last song and played what Dave called the “holy chord” on the organ. The keyboards brought the energy up a level for the band to close out the show.
They invited me to join the band after that and I started getting us gigs opening for bands at clubs in Boston. My previous bandmate in Roadside Attraction, Matt Wasley, had worked hard to get us on shows produced by Gamelan Productions. He saw that they were the ones putting on all of the jamband shows at the Somerville Theater, like Aquarium Rescue Unit, moe. and MMW. As long as we didn’t care about getting paid much—I think we got paid $50 at first—and were going to bring out a bunch of people to buy tickets, they would give us the first slot on a multi-band bill. Matt’s dad also knew about Wally’s Jazz Café as the spot near Berklee and NEC where the best blues, jazz and funk players would perform and jam. Once I got to college at Boston University, I would be there a lot and sat in and jammed a bunch of times.
What type of music did AGP focus on when the band first formed and did the founding members all have similar roots in the rock and jam worlds?
Rob: I think initially they were covering bands like Nirvana and Red Hot Chili Peppers and called themselves Supramundane, among other names. A lot of us were into similar ‘90s grunge, hip-hop, classic rock, a bit of the Grateful Dead and the “new” jambands like Phish. But it was the discovery of funk music that brought the band together. I don’t think any of our parents were playing a lot of funk in the house growing up. The Maceo Parker album Life On Planet Groove, the JB’s Funky Good Time: The Anthology and the DJ Greyboy and Greyboy Allstars albums were also in heavy rotation.
Brendan and I also bonded over classical music. He was pretty serious on trumpet and piano, in addition to guitar. I had been studying classical piano performance and composition at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Mass., through middle school and high school. I landed on Herbie Hancock as my new obsession after Phish in high school. I pretty much stopped listening to Phish and switched over to ‘60s and ‘70s Miles Davis, Coltrane and all the funk stuff we were covering with AGP. John Hall remained our biggest Phish fan. I remember he played us some tapes of Phish’s Island Tour in ‘98, and we were pretty surprised to hear how they had gotten into long funk jams.
While funk and groove are key subgenres of the greater jamband scene at this point, in the mid-to-late ‘90s those sounds were actually quite novel in this world. What was your introduction to the funk side of the improvisational world and can you talk a little bit about how that style played into the jamband puzzle when the band first started making its name?
Rob: Medeski, Martin & Wood performed with Phish in 1995. Trey put out Surrender To The Air. I think those connections were enough to open the door for a lot of new fans to the jazz music that was happening in the ‘90s—“bringing jazz back to the dancefloor.” That intersected with hip-hop bands that were sampling classic-funk records and bands that were covering those classic funk records that were being sampled.
One of Addison Groove Project’s first club shows was opening for Michael Ray, who played on that Surrender To The Air album. Phish also performed at New Orleans Jazz Fest, which started a late-night after-festival scene with Galactic being one of the first bands to do that. There were also prominent bands on the early ‘90s scene like Aquarium Rescue Unit that had plenty of jazz chops.
That paved the way for funk and groove bands to get swallowed up into the overall jam scene. Plus, all of us that got into it in high school were now going to music school and forming bands.
AGP is the rare band who gained some national attention while still in high school and you continued to tour throughout college. For those readers who are a bit younger, where did the five of you matriculate and what was it like going out on the road most weekends throughout the academic year?
Rob: We had a big meeting about whether we should go on tour right away and defer going to college. Our parents were strongly encouraging us to go to school first. We ended up deciding to go to college, keep the band going, tour in the summer and continue after we got our degrees. We went to colleges spread throughout the Northeast. Andrew and I had parents working at Boston University, so we received free tuition to attend there. Brendan went to Brown in Providence. Dave went to the University of Southern Maine jazz program. Ben attended the jazz program at Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. John Hall took a year off while his older sister was graduating college and then he enrolled at Skidmore College. We had several other close friends attending Skidmore, including our future tour manager Aaron Cohen.
We got the band to perform at our college events and parties and a lot of our other friends got us to come up to their schools. We were driving around the Northeast almost every weekend performing at clubs and colleges.
After college, AGP was a full-time project for several years before you all started focusing on your other interests. Was there another discussion about dedicating yourselves to the band after graduation and how do you feel that level of focus helped improve the music?
Rob: Yeah, that was the plan and we were all waiting for John Hall to graduate to hit the road and see if we could take it all to the next level. Unfortunately, John Hall was complaining of stomach pain toward the end of his senior year. At first, the campus nurses thought it was stress related. But eventually, it was discovered that he had a tumor and needed to stay home while our tour started. Shortly into the tour, we found out it was colorectal cancer.
We probably played over 200 shows that year, touring out to California and back. We certainly got very tight, and I learned how to cover bass parts on the keyboards. But we never got to realize our full potential. Listening back to recordings, the time right before John got sick was probably our peak.
I always felt that the two Wicked Live official live albums represented two solidly different eras of the band. Can you look back on where they were recorded and how they captured the band at each of those moments?
Rob: After the summer of 2000, we were coming off our first big summer tour and had a lot of new material. We had production and recording contacts up near Skidmore College from all of the times we had played up there. We were having epic shows every few months at Falstaff’s, the on-campus student bar at Skidmore. We recorded Wicked Live there. It still holds up surprisingly well considering most of us were not even 21 years old.
By the fall of 2002, we had released our second studio album Allophone earlier that year. But we already had another album’s worth of material and recorded two nights of shows at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston. Songs like “Neo Geo” on that album showed where we were heading with more electronic and prog-rock influences.
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