Feedback -- Day by the River -- Unpublished (Sept. 1999)

by Art Howard

The jazz guys I knew in high school and college were a musically snobby lot. Obsessed with theory and technique, they listened to music not for lyrical profundities or irresistible grooves, but as a series of calculus problems to be met, mastered, and moved beyond, with the tunes themselves having no more emotional or social relevance than an algorithm. After college most of them gave up jazz, bought all the Beatles albums, and sold insurance for a living.

This is why fusion freaks should take a page from Day by the River's book. No, forget a page, get the whole book. At last, a band that combines the musical prowess of Weather Report and Return to Forever with compelling lyrics, a hummable melody, and a funk to get your feet moving. Because they've developed jazz-level musicianship but haven't turned their nose up at pop/rock listenability, Day by the River may be the band that finally makes jazz hip to college audiences. Their music has found ready ears in the jam band crowd, and the group's shows are regularly attended by a mass of shake-dancing frat boys and tie-dye adorned Jerry Garcia fanatics. These fans have named themselves "The River Rats."

Day by the River keyboardist, Walt Austin, is talking to me by phone just before a show in St. Louis as the band is on its first tour of the Western U.S. He says when he and fellow bandmates Ted Lahey (vocals, rhythm guitar) Dave Brockway (drums) and Patrick McDonnell (bass) formed their first band at Cedar Shoals High School in Athens they were "a bad `80's cover band." That changed when the four school friends met up again while attending the University of Miami in 1992. There they discovered the Miami music scene and jazz in particular. "It was deeply influential to what we were doing back then," Austin remembers. "We were Southern boys growing up on rock n' roll and the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers. Of course, we grew up on jazz, too; I'm not saying we hadn't listened to our share of Miles Davis and Pat Metheny. But when we got to Miami and immersed ourselves in it, it really made us grow a ton as musicians. No longer could we get by on what we knew. We had to really push ourselves to keep up musically. That was reflected in the writing and the playing: learning how to really craft a solo and play together as a group.

The cool thing is once we got out of school we kind of left all that behind and got back to rockin' out. We remembered our rock roots. Jazz is a huge aspect of what we do, but we still need to rock."

Rock they did. Before the band even graduated they were selling out 500 seat clubs in Miami Beach and appearing with national acts like Colonel Bruce Hampton and The Zen Tricksters. After graduating from the U of M with various music degrees they relocated to Athens and picked up lead guitarist Jason Rabineau in 1995. Appearances on the Horticulture stage of the 1997 H.O.R.D.E. tour helped to grow their following (no pun intended), thanks in no small part to `97 H.O.R.D.E. tour member Neil Young. According to bassist Pat McDonnell in an interview with the Florida Independent Alligator, Young would show up unannounced on the side stage just before DBR's slot to play a solo acoustic set, leaving the band facing a mammoth audience when the troubador left the stage.

That the band has such a jazzy sound without an elitist jazz attitude fascinates me. I probe Austin on how that was accomplished. "It takes a certain level of musician to take what they can from the theory and the technique and remember that music really is about the joy of expression," he explains. "That, and the community you have with an audience. For instance, we listened to Taj Mahal in the van the other day and it was so emotionally moving no one could really even talk. When it comes down to it we just love music, whether its Taj Mahal, Frank Zappa, Ravel's 'Bolero,' or Chick Corea. Just as long as someone's expressing something, that's what matters."

Day by the River is part of an interesting new development in the music industry in that they do not spend their nights dreaming of The Big Record Deal. In fact, the band says they have had offers from major labels and turned them down. What would a major label have to offer Day by the River to get their attention? "There's a certain amount of creative freedom we've gotten used to. For example Agents of Good Roots are an incredible band that I love, but RCA took them and made them sound like what you hear on the radio. We want to preserve our original sound because that's who we are.

We would also want a guarantee that they would push the record. Some of our friends have gotten on a label and thought they were set for life, only to find that they would get a $500,000 deal, the label records the album, and then it sits on a shelf. And these are these people's careers. I guess we're waiting for the moment when we can call our own shots."

Rather than taking a chance on getting lost in the shuffle of a major label's marketing department, the band has used the Internet to tremendous advantage. "It's been incredible for us, man," Austin says. "One thing the Internet did for us is we got out West. We played this festival, the High Sierra Music Festival (in Bear Valley, California), and the reason we got on and got a good spot was because of the buzz on the Internet. We had a great turnout, a great show, and for the rest of the tour we had an incredible response, sometimes even better than what we get in the Southeast. That's pretty intense when you consider we've been playing in the South for about six years.

On top of that, the Web site (www.daybytheriver.com) gets hits from all over the world. We have people checking in from Sri Lanka and Thailand, and actually downloading the music, which boggles my mind. People in Australia are listening to us. We don't have a record label to push us but we're selling records all over the country because of the Internet. We had this thing where we were on MP3.com and we were the number one downloaded MP3. That week we got something like 33,000 hits on our site. It was absolutely sick. That was around April. Outside of the U.S. we've sold the most records in Italy."

The jam band/Grateful Dead scene that has embraced Day by the River, Phish, The String Cheese Incident, and so many others has come in for peculiar treatment from the rock n' roll media. Despite the fact that some of the bands are selling out 20,000 seat venues, MTV, Rolling Stone and other media outlets (with the exception of Feedback and Relix) have totally ignored the genre. I ask Walt why that may be. "It's an underground thing. The Grateful Dead were underground until 'Touch of Grey.' Pat Metheny and Chick Corea aren't in the mainstream, for that matter. I feel like MTV and Rolling Stone are about fashion as much as they're about music, and we're definitely not about fashion!"

"You guys looked like sporty dressers to me," I reply.

"Thank you. We do have a stylist who comes in to do our hair and makeup."

The band's first two self-released CDs, Shimmy from the pre-Rabineau, U of M days, and Fly, produced by Doug Derryberry and John Alagia (Dave Matthews Band) and mixed by John Altschiller (Phish), have sold thousands of copies. Most recently the band blazed a new trail by taking Internet technology off the Internet. The crew went through various live soundboard recordings that had been made of the band over the years, converted them to MP3s, and squeezed four-and-a-half hours of music onto one compact disc called Watermarks. The disc also contains a mini-Web site.

When will we hear an album of new material from DBR, and what will it sound like? "We've been touring so hard we haven't even had time to stop and think about when we're going to go in the studio. There's just too many good festivals to play. The new one's going to be kick-ass, basically. Lately we've all been contributing lyrics; it's becoming more of a group effort. Pat, our bass player, just wrote a song called 'My Song' which is a lot of fun, and Jason and I have been writing a lot lately. But what's it going to be? It's going to be good!"

Put your raft in the water and float upstream with Day by the River.

For more Day by the River, visit the band's site at

www.daybytheriver.com (which may or may not be up) or www.lauan.com.