{"id":2455325,"date":"2020-03-04T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-03-04T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=321926"},"modified":"2020-03-04T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-03-04T07:00:00","slug":"three-nights-of-umphreys-mcgee-at-belly-up-aspen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/three-nights-of-umphreys-mcgee-at-belly-up-aspen\/","title":{"rendered":"Three nights of Umphrey\u2019s McGee at Belly Up Aspen"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Umphrey’s McGee playing at The Apres music festival at Buttermilk in 2019.<\/strong>
Anna Stonehouse\/The Aspen Times<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Springtime is Umphrey\u2019s McGee<\/a> season in Aspen.<\/p>\n

The beloved six-piece progressive jam band\u2019s multi-night springtime runs at Belly Up \u2014 where the band returns for three should Thursday through Saturday night sold-out shows Wednesday and Thursday \u2014 have become a tent-pole event in Aspen\u2019s music scene over the past decade. Last year Umphrey\u2019s opened The Apr\u00e9s, Aspen Skiing Co.\u2019s one-off outdoor music festival, at Buttermilk. And Colorado has become an artistic second home for Umphrey\u2019s, which formed at the University of Notre Dame 22 years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cColorado has become, probably, our biggest market at this point,\u201d Umphrey\u2019s keyboardist Joel Cummins said during one ofthe band\u2019s annual spring visits to Aspen.<\/p>\n

In 2017, Umphrey\u2019s added a three-night stand at Red Rocks Ampitheatre to its summer tour and the band played New Year\u2019s Eve at Denver\u2019s Fillmore Auditorium, while members\u2019 side projects regularly take the stage at small venues in Denver.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re out this way frequently enough that Cummins and his wife buy season ski passes.<\/p>\n

Known for its commitment to fans and its adventurous improvisations \u2014 part Frank Zappa, part Metallica, part Miles Davis \u2014 Umphrey\u2019s McGee will never play the same set twice. Cummins noted that Umphrey\u2019s has about 200 original songs in rotation for its live shows, along with their stable of crowd-pleasing covers (their Apr\u00e9s set included a well-received spin on The Police\u2019s \u201cWhen the World is Running Down, You Make the Best of What\u2019s Around\u201d). But after some 2,500 concerts, keeping it fresh takes some work. The band studies set lists of prior Aspen performances to avoid repeating themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe do think about those individual fan bases and we try to give everybody a nice range of things,\u201d Cummins said. \u201cEven year-to-year, you\u2019re likely to get completely different songs over a three-night stand in Aspen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Different band members write the set list from night to night.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a fun, creative thing to pass that around between band members,\u201d Cummins said. \u201cSo sometimes we\u2019ll consider the fans more and sometimes we\u2019ll play what we want to play. It\u2019s got to be a healthy balance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Personal fan service has been the heart of the Umphrey\u2019s project from the start. As they broke out nationally in the early 2000s, they became one of the first acts to make CD recordings of concerts immediately available to fans. That initiative spawned a Grateful Dead-styled tape-trading culture among the Umphrey\u2019s faithful, where superfans debate the best versions of songs, best improvisations, best sets and study the minutia of live performances.<\/p>\n

Many fans who make the pilgrimage to Aspen have seen upwards of 100 Umphrey\u2019s shows.<\/p>\n

And though Umphrey\u2019s McGee\u2019s ambitious live performances \u2014 with coordinated light shows and wild jams \u2014 are the band\u2019s signature, they also take immense pride in making records. When they\u2019re recording, Cummins said surprisingly, the band doesn\u2019t think much about how a song might translate live.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a great thing to be able to go into the studio and treat that as its own piece of art and not worry about how you\u2019re going to pull it off live,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Umphrey\u2019s band released its 11th studio album, \u201cit\u2019s not us,\u201d in early 2018, followed by a surprise 12th \u201cit\u2019s you\u201d four months later. These newest songs are a stylistic adventure for the band. From song to song, they jump from the heavy metal of \u201cRemind Me\u201d to the acoustic folk balladry of \u201cYou & You Alone\u201d to the industrial rock of \u201cLooks\u201d and the dance pop of \u201cForks.\u201d<\/p>\n

To make the album, the band lived together in a rented five-bedroom downtown Chicago condo in late 2016. As guys in their 40s, half of them with young kids at home, that kind of uninhibited creative time is increasingly rare. So, Cummins said, it was a treat to live and breathe the new music.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019d leave the studio, go back to the condo and keep talking music,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was a cool and uniquely immersive experience for us to dive into our music like that. It added to the focus. It added to the fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cummins said he and his bandmates went into the studio for \u201cit\u2019s not us\u201d with about 20 song ideas in disparate styles and challenged themselves to mold them into a coherent 11-track record.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were picking what we thought were the best songs,\u201d he said. \u201cObviously for most bands these wouldn\u2019t go together. But people have come to expect that. It\u2019s what we call \u2018ADD Rock\u2019 sometimes.\u201d<\/p>\n

In their third decade together, Cummins credits the longevity of Umphrey\u2019s to its members\u2019 tight-knit bonds.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe put our friendships first and that\u2019s been huge for this band,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve all been through ups and downs musically onstage and personally off stage. To go out there and know that you\u2019ve got each other\u2019s backs \u2014 it\u2019s an important lesson, I think, for putting together a successful team.\u201d<\/p>\n

After two decades, many musicians get sucked into nostalgia and stop looking forward. That\u2019s not the case for Umphrey\u2019s, which has fans as excited to hear the new songs as the old ones, for rarities alongside standards like \u201cAll in Time\u201d and \u201c2\u00d72.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt feels like we are a band that\u2019s about the cumulative experience of what Umphrey\u2019s McGee has been,\u201d Cummins said. \u201cIn the improvisational rock-band scene you sometimes hear fans complaining, \u2018Oh, the old stuff was so much better.\u2019 To not have that experience is cool.\u201datravers@aspentimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Umphrey’s McGee playing at The Apres music festival at Buttermilk in 2019.Anna Stonehouse\/The Aspen Times Springtime is Umphrey\u2019s McGee season in Aspen. The beloved six-piece progressive jam band\u2019s multi-night springtime runs at Belly Up \u2014 where the band returns for three should Thursday through Saturday night sold-out shows Wednesday and Thursday \u2014 have become a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2455325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-18 12:28:45","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2455325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2455325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2455325\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2455325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2455325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2455325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}