“New York has always been a very special place for us. New York represented the turning point for us as a band,” explains Aron Magner, keyboard player of the ever-popular electronic jamband, the Disco Biscuits. “Even the confidence instilled in us is thanks to New York. When we started playing Wetlands ... that’s when our career started to take off.” He adds that, a decade ago, neither he nor his fellow band members—Jon Gutwillig (guitar), Marc Brownstein (bass) and Allen Aucion (drums)—ever thought they’d last this long as a group.
When the Philadelphia-based band started out in the mid-’90s, while all of its members were still undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania, its sole purpose was having a bit of fun and providing the music for friends’ college parties. “It would be like, ‘Hey my house is having a party. You guys wanna play?’” says Magner of the band’s early, easy-going dorm days before it figured that maybe it could make a career out being a jam band. That realization came not long after the group’s first visit to NYC where, to its surprise, it was very warmly received: so much so that the Disco Biscuits landed a residency-like relationship with the club Wetlands where it ended up playing a total of 26 gigs before outgrowing the venue to graduate to the bigger Irving Plaza and later the even larger Roseland Ballroom. And this week they will hold down two nights at Hammerstein Ballroom.
So just how does a rock band rooted in the Grateful Dead/Phish school of long introspective jams, with the average song clocking in at 15 to 30 minutes, become so popular in this modern age of short attention spans? “We give the people what they want,” Magner answers matter-of-factly. One of the things the people apparently want is the musically eclectic festival Camp Bisco that the band members created in 1999, at first as a way to ensure that they would get enough time to play their long sets properly as well as having the authority to carefully select the other artists on the bill. At last year’s Camp Bisco the impressive lineup that joined the Biscuits included the Roots, Brazilian Girls and Thievery Corporation—a roster that one wouldn’t automatically associate with jam band fans. But Magner, who stressed that he doesn’t wish “to bite the hand that feeds,” implied that the Biscuits doesn’t necessarily identify its sound as strictly “jam band.”
“Trance-fusion” is a better description of the group’s electronica-enhanced, jazz-fusion, progressive-rock hybrid—which it sometimes improvises further by flipping into a unique backward style: starting a song at the end and working in reverse. A jam by any other name still sounds as sweet.
Nov 24-25. Hammerstein Ballroom, 311 W. 34th St. (at 8th Ave.), 212-307-7171; 6:30, $32.
