This week's #ThisDealInHistory comes to us from theNEWDEAL's concert in Boulder, CO on 01/19/2001. Boulder is one of those classic old-school tND haunts - somehow we (along with all my side projects) always ended up there.
When the band decided to start touring early on in our career, "BoCo" was near the top of the list of places to play - hell, the original title of our track "Sub Sky" was "Boulder" due to the song's creation on stage at the Fox.
So... what better place to kick off our 2001 Winter Tour than in one of our favourite venues (The Fox Theatre) in one of our favourite cities, right?
The cut begins with some early-era tND-style Drum+Bass. Note that the bass is being played on the keys (prob the Juno 106) while Dan is playing a repeated line with some evil tremolo above it.
From 0:10 - 0:20 there's also a tease of Joe Jackson's "Steppin' Out". At 1:24 i add some fuzz to that Juno sound and we bust along until the abrupt shift at 1:54 (i always love those) into a midtempo swung groove (probably the polar opposite style of the frenetic Drum+Bass that preceded it).
The next three minutes features a prototypical early tND jam. The bass takes the lead in defining the groove and the keys eventually morph into big open chords played with a big open sound. There's some serious musical patience going on here - none of us are in a hurry to get anywhere and we're all very comfortable with letting the vibe develop at its own speed and in its own time. It's almost hypnotic in its own way and proves to me that if you're confident in and committed to what you're playing then all time constraints melt away.
Dan plays the trigger cue for "Deep Sun" at 4:43, eventually turning it into the main groove as Darren and I start increasing the tempo and sliding into a Deep Sun Intro jam.
Here's another example of the trigger cue getting played but the band taking their sweet time in actually getting to the song proper. Five minutes will pass between the initial trigger cue and the first notes of the "Deep Sun" melody. This section features all the hallmarks of an early ('99-'01) tND jam. The emphasis is definitely on the groove with chord changes and melodic elements taking a back seat. This was chiefly due to our desire to further develop our aforementioned "musical patience" but it was also due in part to the conscious decision by the band to stay away from what we felt was the standard platform for the jamband scene at that time: playing a bunch of solos over the same rhythmic bed and calling it a "jam". We never saw the value in that and felt that it was counterproductive to the natural development and expansion of musical ideas. We had yet to work out our concept of actually writing songs on stage but the kernels of that musical plan were definitely present in our early ideas about improvisation and development.
Note the bass yet again taking the musical lead at 10:04, defining the rhythm and harmonic direction. Clearly somebody sent up some hand signals because we drop in some shots, returning to a new groove at 10:48.
Even in this section i'm playing off what Dan is laying down in the bass - taking his ideas and complementing them with my own parts as we build into the reprise of the "Deep Sun" theme that closes out this week's excerpt. -Jamie
