Photo by Kevin Browning
The new Umphreys McGee lighting designer has been a familiar figure in the jamband community since the mid-1990s. Indeed, journalist, band manager, radio host, and former moe. LD Jefferson Waful helped define the evolving improv scene en route to a formidable visual career. In late 2008, Waful filled in for longtime Umphreys LD Adam Budney at a few shows, and that gig became permanent earlier this year as the jam/prog rock band continues touring in support of their breakthrough album, Mantis.
We sat down with the former Uncle Sammy manager, Jambands.com writer, Jam Nation co-host (with site editor, Dean Budnick), and current light man extraordinaire for a look back at his musical background, numerous creative endeavors, lighting artistry, and the ways in which the Internet has changed the concert-going experience over the years.
Jefferson Waful is a talented lighting designer who has extensively studied the music that he helps illuminate on a nightly basis. It is this knowledge that also makes him such a fascinating interview subject as Waful continues to hone his own unique artistic gifts while recognizing the influences that we all, perhaps, share. Part I of our two-part series focuses on his current work, early exposure to music (and by early, we mean right after birth), the road that led from being a fan to radio broadcasts to band promotion to lighting design, and his thoughts on the impact of Chris Kuroda.
Truss 1
Photo by Ryan Myers
A few sounds re-create images from the painting (dogs barking, bells ringing)through the music, the painting becomes haunted, ghostlythe visual idea is devastating in itself. The Solaris Effect, Steven Dillon
RR: What’s the biggest challenge of taking over as the new lighting designer for Umphrey’s McGee?
JW: The biggest challenge is merely just learning all of their material. There is just so much of it, and it’s so complex—just the nature of the band, their compositions are very intricate. It seems to me that a lot of their earlier compositions, they purposely try to throw curve balls that keep the listener off balance so things aren’t in the standard rock time signature of 4/4. As a lighting designer, there are a lot of bands that I could step in and work for, and basically run the entire show the first time ever hearing them. To the viewer, it might not be noticeable that it’s a new lighting designer because there are certain formulas in rock music. I’ve done this before when I’ve worked at clubs where you stand in, and you work for a band, and it’s verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-guitar solo, and then, the drummer cues the big obvious ending. I can step in and do lights for a band like that on day 1, and it will look like part of the show.
Umphrey’s bends over backwards to make their songs not adhere to those standard rock formulas, which is really interesting and I think, ultimately, the payoff is a lot greater when I do actually nail all of those changes. It just takes a really long time to learn all of those because I can’t rely on my instincts and my 33 years of listening to music. You just have to memorize it all. That’s clearly the biggest challenge.
RR: Are there any particular songs that have posed an even greater challenge?
JW: I remember when I first started working for the band; songs like “Bridgeless” were tough. I remember the first times I did it, the infamous Rob Turner, who I know has done a lot of work for Jambands.com [and Relix], and is a big Umphrey’s fan, pulled me aside and said, “You should really learn that one.” (laughter) That one stuck out to him. I thought I was doing a great job, but apparently it wasn’t up to Rob Turner’s standards. I purposely went back and gave that one extra listening.
But yeah, it’s funny. There’s a whole category of songs. I downloaded them all and I keep them all on my iPhone so I can brush up on them. There’s a whole category of songs—probably 30 or 40 songs—that require extra listening. They do have—especially in the latter years—more traditional rock songs. But even those still have quirks in them that unless you’ve memorized them, and spent 5 to 10 listens of doing your homework, you’re going to get tripped up. It’s hard, again, for me to guess at the changes so it’s really muscle memory and that’s been the biggest challenge.
With moe., I had worked for them for almost 5 years so all of the songs were in my DNA. I had done them enough times that it was all instinct at that point. And that is where you want to be as a lighting designer. You want to take thinking out of the equation so that you’re not thinking about what’s coming next. You’re just living in the present moment, and you’re able to free your mind from the technical details, and just go with the flow, and be open to improvisation. When you’re thinking about the changes, you’re not able to prepare for what’s coming next. When you know exactly what’s going to happen, you’re not reacting, you’re anticipating. That’s really the key for me—always to be anticipating. The only way to do that is to know the music cold.
RR: That’s a very interesting comment. I’ve been speaking with a lot of guitarists lately, and that theme of muscle memory while on stage has come up quite often. I never thought about that aspect when trying to understand your lighting process. One of my early questions for you when researching this feature was “what is your approach in regards to pre-planning versus pure chance for lighting a gig”?
JW: To me, it is all very much like having a vast vocabulary. The more words you know, the more well-versed you’re going to be in conversation. I try to have as many different pre-programmed themes as possible in a catalogue that I can then call up at any particular moment, and I try to name them in certain ways. The naming process is really important because you’ll only have a split second a lot of the times if the band suddenly takes a turn. And, of course, a band like Umphrey’s McGee does a lot of improvisation, so much so that they have, you know, those “Jimmy Stewart” sections written into the setlist where’s it’s specifically improv exercises. It’s not just by chance, it’s planned—“third song in, we’re going to do a section of improv.” A lot of times, I need to know exactly where I’m going if they suddenly take a turn into an evil section, or a funk section, or a trance section, so I try to name all of the specific pre-programmed cues with names that I could easily think of in the moment, and I don’t have to do too much thinking.
I’ve equated it to Fred Norris on the Howard Stern show. I don’t know how familiar you are with the show, but Fred is the guy who does all of the sound effects. At any given time, as quickly as possible, he has to call up a sound effect that’s going to be appropriate. I’ve often thought that my job is so similar to his in that regard. To him, it’s all in the way that he categorizes it on his computer so that he can call up the appropriate fart noise during the conversation. If it’s not named the correct way, it might take him a little bit longer, and by that point, the moment’s gone. It’s not funny anymore if you’re five seconds too late. It’s the same thing with lighting. If I call up a pretty look five seconds after the band has gone to a pretty section, it doesn’t look right. You have to hit it exactly on cue, or else there’s no point in even doing it.
RR: And when you hit those moments, and the lighting doesn’t look completely rehearsed, I would think that would be the ultimate compliment, right?
JW: Absolutely. In an improvisational sense, yes. Anyone can memorize a song. If the goal is to be guessing the same way the band is, so that it’s almost that telepathic connection, then that is really what anyone is looking for in the improvisational world.
Whether you’re a fan at the show or you’re involved in the process, it’s always trying, I feel, to reach that point where you’re communicating seemingly telepathically, and that is certainly what I strive for.
Truss 2
Photo by Brett Saul
...and every man will be welcome among us who can teach us any thing we do not know. For your part, you will find all your old friends willing to receive you. – Life of Johnson, James Boswell
RR: Phish lighting designer Chris Kuroda is obviously someone who has received a small bit of praise in his two-decade career. What has been the impact of his work on your own lighting design?
JW: I have been drawn to his light show since probably 1993. I first interviewed him in 1998 for Jambands.com, and I got much more of a grasp of what he does on a technical level. He has undoubtedly been the biggest influence on me—almost to a fault. It is something that I struggle with a lot, trying to not have my light show not look like his. But, you know, I saw a lot of Phish shows so, you are what you eat. It’s the same way that Trey had to try to not sound like Jerry when he first started playing. Any musician, or any artist—you take what you know and you try to make it your own.
For me, it’s been really interesting because of the timing of the way that everything worked out. When Phish broke up in 2004, I was literally in training on my first day on how to use the light board that I currently use—a GrandMA console. I was using that for the first time when I got a phone call saying, “I just heard Phish broke up.” The timing of my job with moe. was a little bit eerie to me. Then, of course, I’ve moved on to Umphrey’s McGee and now Phish is back, so my entire career as a professional lighting designer occurred while Phish was off the road.
In a big way, that was a blessing because I wasn’t actively seeing Phish. I was able to try to find my own style. Obviously, still, in the context of lighting, I feel that Chris really invented a style that a whole generation of LDs are influenced by. He took moving lights, and used the movement of the lights…I mean, Pink Floyd and Genesis obviously did this, but really, to me, he took it to a whole other level where he uses the slow movement and the grace, and it always looked like a ballerina dancer gracefully dancing to the music. It wasn’t necessarily about lighting up a subject. Clearly, you want the band members to be lit, but also, there’s this whole other picture being painted above the stage. The slow movement of the lights from point A to point B became, to me, what was his trademark.
There are still old school lighting designers to this day that came of age before moving lights were invented so they use moving lights now as key lights to light up a subject matter, but they don’t actually use the movement of the lights themselves as part of the show. Clearly, most people do at this point, but I felt like that was one of the things that I was influenced most by Kuroda. If the band is playing very frantically at a hyper speed, the lights moving really slowly creates much more drama than trying to match the speed or tempo of the band.
I started doing lights professionally while Phish was off the road, and now that they’re back, going to see them with a different frame of reference, it is interesting to me to see the things that I was sort of subconsciously influenced by. Because again, when you’ve seen a band over a hundred times, a lot of that stuff just winds up being in your blood, in your subconscious. I wasn’t doing it on purpose. I talked about not thinking while doing a light show. You need to have some frame of reference so you wind up doing what you’re…basically, it’s the meaning of life: you do what you know, and it is the same way I wound up in the music business because I was exposed to music as a child. I moved the lights slowly during a dramatic part because that’s the way I learned to interpret music and lights.
It’s interesting to come back now and watch Kuroda work because not only do I notice things that I do as a result of what I’ve seen him do, but I also notice things that I would do differently which is a really weird thing to me. He was always the be-all end-all to me, and now I think “maybe I would have gone with yellow right there.” But, you know, he is the grandfather of that style of lighting and he’s influenced a whole generation. To me, it’s about taking what I like about his stuff, trying to make it new, and make my show look different because, as an artist, you need to find your own voice. It’s important to have influences, and everyone has them, but it’s also important to find your own direction—that is something that I try to do constantly.
Truss 3
Photo by Kevin Browning
Here is the loudest band in the history of rock, playing behind a monolithic sound system with stacks of Marshall amps looking like some Aztec monument to the Gods, and you can’t hear them over the applause. “This…*this* is a rock concert.” – *Led Zeppelin: Heaven and Hell*, Charles R. Cross and Erik Flannigan
RR: Let’s go back to the beginning—as far back as you want to go. How did your interest in music develop over the years?
JW: Well, you’re going to think I’m making this up, but my first word was “light.” I feel very fortunate that it wasn’t “insurance salesman.” I was in my grandparents’ kitchen in Syracuse, New York, which is the city where I was born, and I looked up and pointed at the light, and said, “dight” with a d. I haven’t mispronounced it since, but you have to cut me a little slack, as I believe I was less than a year old. From then on, my grandfather called me The Dighter.
It was actually fitting because my tryout shows for moe. were in Mattydale, New York, which is very close to Syracuse, and only a few miles from where my first words were spoken, and where I was born. And just two days ago, Umphrey’s played in Baldwinsville [6/27/09], which is also just outside of Syracuse. My 92-year old grandfather came to the show, met the band, and watched part of the first song. He’s a musician, as well. Music has always been in my family. He’s played the trombone for 70 years. My dad is a musician. He plays guitar, and my mom is a visual artist, so I’m really a product of my environment. I was always surrounded by music.
RR: Do you play any musical instruments?
JW: There was a music room in the house where I lived as a baby, up until the age of 5. It was like a second living room. It had a Mexican rug and a little drum set that I used to play. I think that drums were actually my first instrument. That was just by chance because it’s easier to bang on drums than to form an F chord on guitar when you’re a toddler. Then I moved on to guitar when I was 2 or 3, and there has been an acoustic guitar in my room my entire life. I used to play music with my dad all the time. Even when I was 5 years old, we would have a jam session, and I would either bang on a tambourine, or a bongo. As I got a little bit older, and my dexterity matured, I was able to form chords, and I’ve played guitar ever since.
My parents took me to my first concert when I was two weeks old—Jesse Colin Young. They were in the second row. Now—that seems completely inappropriate for an infant. But at the time, the technology hadn’t progressed to the point where it is now, where it’s just so loud that you can’t even get near the stage. At the time, [my dad] told me he’d go to concerts and put his ear right up next to the speaker to try to hear better. Now—you’d be deaf. But at the time, they hadn’t invented the technology for speakers to be loud enough like they are now. He would literally put his ear up to the speaker. Being in the second row would be like being at a symphony now—you want to be as close as you can to try to hear. Apparently, this was right on the cusp of when that technology was coming out, and as soon as the band started up, it became obvious that it was way too loud, and they ran out of there. My whole body stiffened up, and my parents worried that they had ruined me. And I guess, in a weird way, they did; here I am, all these years later. Thank God.
RR: Yeah. We’re talking mid-70s, here, right?
JW: 1975. Yep.
RR: What sort of music did you get turned on to as you grew up?
JW: As a kid, just like most kids, I was turned on to the music that my parents listened to. Neil Young was always at the top of that list—Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young was my parents’ first date. The Beatles, obviously. Bob Marley. I remember always listening to Fleetwood Mac. All the classics. It’s funny that, to this day, I still list those as probably my top five favorite bands as far as classic artists. Like I said, I’m a product of my environment. Music was always a priority in my family. And still is. My dad still gigs out to this day.
As I got a little bit older, and reached my adolescence, I branched out and started listening to some music that was more of my own that my parents weren’t in to. I went through my rap phase with Public Enemy. I went through a Zeppelin phase. My parents love rock ‘n’ roll but I don’t think they were ever particularly drawn to Led Zeppelin for whatever reason. That was more of my thing.
We have to remember there was no internet back then, which is hard to imagine, so I didn’t hear Phish until I graduated from high school because there would have been no way of hearing of them except for word of mouth, and I was stranded out on Cape Cod where I grew up. When I got out of high school, I saw my first Phish show at the age of 17, which was 1993, and that became more of my generation’s thing.
My parents were always encouraging, and the first time I ever went to a Phish show, I felt very connected to my parents because it looked like Woodstock. The people all looked the same. The vibe seemed the same. My dad was at Woodstock so it really reminded me of all of his stories and all of this documentary footage that I had always seen of the 60s.
It felt very natural to me, and I brought my parents to some shows. But seeing that first Phish show—like pretty much everyone my age—sort of changed the course of my life, and was the beginning of me working in the industry, and being so passionate about this style of music, which led me to all of these other bands.
Truss 4
Photo by Kevin Browning
We may have had to do things the hard way, but it also meant we had to put in the effort to get it right. – *Here, There and Everywhere*, Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey
RR: How did you get more involved in the music scene, including your stints as a radio broadcaster, band manager, and music journalist?
JW: It’s hard to trace back where everything started. I’m sure most of it started when I was in the second row at Jesse Colin Young when I was five days old, or whatever. As far as specifics, I used to talk to my dad about music all the time, and hear the stories of the 60s. He had a big, thick book, which I’ve talked about with other people in the industry, and they all talk about this book, Bill Graham Presents [My Life Inside Rock and Out, co-written by the promoter and writer Robert Greenfield].
I remember talking to Andrew Stahl at Gamelan Productions, and that actually has to do with the story because one of my first jobs in the industry had to do with Gamelan Productions, who put on the Berkshire Mountain Music Festival, and were a big jamband promoter in the mid-90s in Boston, and that actually led into me managing Uncle Sammy. I sort of innocently asked [Stahl] at one point: “Have you ever read this book?” And he laughed and said, “Yeah, that’s my bible.”
It’s such great insight of a behind the scenes vision of what actually happened in the music industry. To me, it was just so fascinating to go through the glossary, and I used to look up my favorite bands. You could jump to page 328, and read about the time the promoter got into a fight with the security guard over Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and Bill Graham slipping one hundred dollar bills underneath the door to the backstage, trying to coax them into doing an encore after they swore they wouldn’t do one, and telling the light guy to turn down the house lights so the crowd would cheer, and the band would hear them cheering and that would make them more motivated to come back. All of these stories were so fascinating to me. I was also watching Behind the Music on VH-1, religiously, and I lived with all of the Uncle Sammy guys in a big house, and that’s what we watched at 2 in the morning, or whenever it was on.
I was in college at the time. I went to Emerson in Boston, and I was a Broadcast Journalism major. I had a radio show called “Space Jam” on WERS, and this was before the term “jambands” had really been coined. We were calling it psychedelic rock, or improvisational rock. This would have been 1995 when I started there. I inherited the show from somebody that had already graduated; the show already existed, and it was originally called “Psychedelic Crunch.” The only people that would remember “Psychedelic Crunch” would be people that were in Boston at the time, and bands like the Spin Doctors, Blues Traveler, God Street Wine, and I think moe. probably was on there. I remember inheriting these shoeboxes of CDs of all the bands that had been on “Psychedelic Crunch.” There weren’t really a lot of other jamband shows at the time. I’m sure there were a couple in some small college markets, but as far as I know of, that was one of the only places where, now, what we call jambands, would be played.
I inherited these couple shoeboxes of CDs, and I played the song “Timmy Tucker” by moe., and that was one of the songs that I was really into. I knew of Phish at the time, which is what led me to do that show, so at the time, I was looking for bands that sounded like Phish. I remember Percy Hill had the song “Been So Long”—that was also in the shoebox. I did that show, and I was using my background as a Broadcast Journalism major—that’s why I was there.
Ultimately, what wound up happening was that I became more entangled in the music industry side of things than the journalism side of things, and clearly, I was using both skill sets. That’s when I picked up a pay phone—before cell phones existed—and I called up Gamelan Productions because they were the local promoter that did these jambands shows, and I said, “Hi, I’m Jeff and I do this radio show, and I want to promote your concerts and give away tickets.” The guy who was on the other end of the phone was Andrew Stahl, and he, of course, jumped at the chance to get publicity for his shows. We started working together, and I started doing ticket giveaways, and having bands that would come to town, come in and do live performances in our studio. That was one of the things that was very fortunate—they had this whole recording studio, in house, at the radio station. You could have bands come in and create these amazing recordings, and go out live over the air. The bands, of course, would jump at the chance. None of these bands were getting airplay on a lot of other stations. Boston is such a major market as far as college kids. They have more college kids than almost any other city.
It really was this lucky timing coincidence that all of these things were happening. Gamelan was doing these jamband shows, Phish was inheriting this throne from the Grateful Dead, and all of these things were happening at the same time. That was really when I started to learn about the music industry. I wound up working with Gamelan after that, and that’s when I started managing Uncle Sammy because I had these friends who went to the Berklee School of Music, and I saw the potential in them. I said, “Hey, you guys should start a band because we have all of these outlets to promote you. I could get you a gig through Gamelan, and I could talk to these people that I know, and spread the word.”
That’s actually how I met Dean Budnick [author, filmmaker, Relix Executive Editor, Jambands.com Site Editor, Waful’s Jam Nation co-host, and driver of the Winnebago]. I eventually came to work for Jambands.com because I had met Dean when he was promoting his book The Phishing Manual. He came on the radio show to talk about the book. I was so fascinated by this guy who had heard every Phish show up to that point. That was Dean’s method of writing the book—he listened to every Phish show in chronological order, and to me that blew my mind that he even had all these shows on tape because, at the time, that was hard to do. You couldn’t just download the show. You had to know someone who taped, or you had to be a taper yourself. You had to collect these tapes. I don’t even know if people know what tapes are anymore. At the time, it was Maxell XLII—that was the form. Ten years later, Dean and I were eventually doing a jamband radio show together, but that was originally how we met, through WERS in Boston.
Truss 5
Photo by Brett Saul
High up above, aliens hover, making home movies for the folks back home… – “Subterranean Homesick Alien,” Radiohead, OK Computer
RR: You mentioned “word of mouth” being the way you got into Phish back in the early 1990s, which would eventually lead to your career in the music industry. There are various opinions of that concept, but I think some people don’t realize how critical the simple passing of knowledge from fan to fan was in that era. How important was word of mouth communication back in those days?
JW: It absolutely was critical. It was the only thing that there was. Certainly Rolling Stone wasn’t writing about Phish. The H.O.R.D.E. festival had happened, and I felt that came out of the Wetlands scene. Clearly, word of mouth is a lot more effective when you’re in a city with 10,000,000 plus people. Being out on Cape Cod, as I was, nobody really knew anything about that. I learned about Phish through a buddy of mine who went to prep school. He had heard word of mouth because he had lived with kids who were from other major metropolitan areas and had older brothers that had gone to Wetlands, and Phish played prep schools and that was the way that people learned about them. I’ve told this story before, but the first time I was going to see Phish, I thought I was going to see Fishbone. That was about as much as I knew about the band. I associated their name with Fishbone—that’s who I thought I was going to see, so word of mouth was everything back then.
It’s so different these days. That’s a whole other discussion—the fact that the Internet has not only helped the music scene tremendously, and made it explode, but it has also hindered it in some ways. It takes away some of the mythical qualities and some of the magical qualities when you can hear the show the next morning, or a couple of hours later, or in an extreme case, streaming on an iPhone live during the show, and you’re getting text updates every song. It takes away some of the legend of hearing it told in a folklore sort of way—the camp fire discussions, the water cooler discussions, and people saying, “I heard the Grateful Dead playing this song last week, and it was the first time they had played it in ten years.”
I feel like, now, the Internet has made everything so immediate. And people spend half the show, at best, probably even more, looking at their phone, instead of actually experiencing the moment live. They are trying to text, or e-mail, people that aren’t there, to fill them in on how great the experience is. It’s hard for the person recounting the story to recount it if they’re spending their time on their phone. It’s an interesting phenomenon.
RR: I’m glad you brought that up because you’ve had various roles within the music scene, and now you are an established lighting designer. If one is looking down at a phone throughout a gig, then one is missing the whole visual experience. Do you try to tell a story with your work, creating a unique adventure at each gig?
JW: Well, that’s certainly the goal. The goal is always to be so immersed in the music that you’re not thinking about anything else. The goal is to have a Zen-like experience, and it’s a tricky balance because a lot of times I’m paying close attention to the music, but I’m also trying to use as much as my energy as possible to do a good light show. It’s a tricky balance to be hanging on every note of the music, but again, trying to anticipate where it’s going, and have something ready.
As a fan, if you’re at a show, you’re trying to immerse yourself in the music, and not think about anything, just be hanging on every note. As a lighting designer, I try to do that as much as possible, but at the same time, I’m still working. I’m still trying to have something ready to go so I can’t completely lose myself in the music, but I want to lose myself as much as I can and still do my job.
A lot of times, after the show, one of the band members will come up to me and ask, “What did you think?” I’ll say, “Well…” It’s hard for me to know because I was focusing so much on doing my job that it was hard for me to actually form an opinion on how the music was. Usually, the way I can tell is if I think I had a really good night, lighting wise, usually those nights are the nights when the band plays the best. When the band is cranking on all cylinders, when they’re playing a really great show, it makes my job easy because, ultimately, I’m just following the band. When they’re clicking, when they’re having that telepathic communication, it allows me to effortlessly light them. It just seems natural. It just seems like “oh, obviously, we’re all going to go to this weird section right now spontaneously because it’s just what the cosmos is telling us, and we’re all feeling that energy.” That has to do with the crowd, that has to do with the band members being in the right frame of mind, and when all of those things are happening, and everyone reaches that place where it just seems like the obvious place for the music to go, then it makes my job obvious, too. “Here we are, and the lights are going to do this particular thing at this particular moment because it’s the right thing to do according to the universe.” And those are the nights that are magical—when the band says, “How was it?” and I say, “Absolutely amazing.” To me, that means that everything was clicking and it makes my job pretty effortless.
- Tune in next month for Part II and more from Jefferson Waful on his lighting design, years writing for Jambands.com, his radio work, his time as the moe. lighting designer, and his further observations on the evolving light work of Phish LD Chris Kuroda.
