Traffic Jam

For Gary Hartman, co-head of local independent promotion company Tapir Productions, the moment of truth came after the jam band String Cheese Incident played the Fabulous Satellite Lounge in 1998. "It was about their fifth show there," he says, "and they still weren't selling the place out. Then they went to Austin and sold out two nights in a row at Liberty Lunch. It was obvious then that we weren't going to see String Cheese in Houston again in our lifetimes. The whole phenomenon of bands playing New Orleans then Austin and skipping the fourth-largest city in the country on their way became painfully obvious to me."

Hartman and his Tapir partner, Alan Friedman, are devoted to improvisational music, be it straight-up jam band material or its many variants. "The whole idea of playing without a net and having the music be different every night is considered a good thing by some of us," says Friedman. Today several genres fall under the improv umbrella, making "jam music" an amorphous concept. It's easy to imagine standard jam acts like Phish or Widespread Panic sharing a bill with the groove jazz of Karl Denson's Tiny Universe on one extreme and the warped bluegrass of the Yonder Mountain String Band on the other.

How, then, can you tell if a band is a jam band? Listen, look and smell. If it's American roots music -- jazz, country, bluegrass, blues or rock-- stretched to the max, and the band allows you to tape the performance, it might be a jam show. If the air around you smells like the '70s -- a melange of patchouli and weed -- and there are vendors selling "tobacco accessories," bead curtains and scented candles, you're probably at a jam show. And if there's a drum circle between sets, you know you're at a jam show.

As of 1998, most of these events were passing the Bayou City by, and Hartman and Friedman weren't happy about it. Neither were they pleased with some of the venues in town, especially the Mucky Duck, which until recently had a monopoly on big-name touring bluegrass acts like Peter Rowan (whom Tapir has now booked twice for other Houston venues). "The Mucky is kind of an archetype of not really caring about the music," says Hartman. "It has a crappy sound system and there are cash registers ringing during the show…It's not the kind of environment I enjoy. He had the really hot bluegrass bands like the Del McCoury Band [coming again April 18] there, and we weren't allowed to dance, let alone tape, let alone have anything that even looks like a good time…"

So Hartman and Friedman decided to do something about it. Much like the similarly fed-up indie rock fans of the Hands Up Houston Show Collective, they started booking their own shows. Their Tapir Productions (the name refers to the fact that they encourage taping as well as to the piglike Amazonian critter) has in the last two years brought the David Nelson Band, the Yonder Mountain String Band, Two High String Band, the Slip, Ancient Harmony, Greyhounds, Peter Rowan, Tim O'Brien, Umphrey's McGee and Hanuman to dancer-friendly venues like Garden in the Heights, the Fabulous Satellite Lounge, DiverseWorks and the Last Concert Cafe.

The Last Concert, which is widely known on the jam scene for its "kindness," has become the unofficial venue of choice for Tapir. The club will play host to two events over the weekend of April 20: a 420 Festival starring the Tony Furtado Band and Smokin' Grass on Saturday, and on Sunday, the Second Annual Space City Spacegrass Festival with Rowan and former New Grass Revival singer John Cowan.

"We book acts that you could see three nights in a row and only get a few repeats," Friedman says. "The spontaneity makes it interesting. We also try to book two bands on the same bill that either know each other or have some reason to cross-pollinate, and we've managed to get a lot of neat collaborations, where people will sit in on each other's set. And then you automatically get something that has never been done before."

Though the straight-up jam band wave seems to have crested, the bluegrass segment of the movement is red-hot. But how did the whiskey-soaked music of Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers end up in such fragrant environs? Despite an association with the word "grass," what does this music invented by God-fearing, stern mountaineers have to offer the Ben & Jerry hordes?

"I think that a lot of the sense of bluegrass is that they like to play without a net," opines Friedman. "It's unique every time they come out. They take requests, they play what they feel like playing every night. That's what appeals to both the jam band crowd and the bluegrass crowd."