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Fort Worth, TX—North then South, back and forth over the Red River, Fort Worth’s Peach Truck Republic and their new friends out of Oklahoma, Tulsa’s own Sun Cured Red, have decided to cross the miles in much the same way as they’ve crossed the musical divide. Though each has its own distinct origin, these two bands have come together in an endeavor to share both their diversity and their commonality throughout one another’s respective hometown regions. Each band will serve in turn as ambassador to the other in a series of four live performances scheduled to take place during the month of December.
The thing that has drawn these two groups of musicians together is a love of (and a reputation for) great live performances, but it’s the matter of how each band arrived at its current status that begins to speak, somewhat ironically, of their fundamental differences. Differences that simultaneously separate them and, through diversification, join them together in a very well rounded musical coalition.
Observing the artistic qualities that make each group who it is, listeners will come to appreciate the fact that both of these bands have their own distinct source of origin. Where one would seemingly translate the energy of live performance to its records the other would take the expansion of its records to the stage. There exists a natural variance in each band’s personal preference that, when taken together, leaves little out there that remains undone. Listeners can expect the full spectrum of rock and roll’s finest traditions when taking in the music of these two bands.
Peach Truck comparisons run a classic gamut—from The Allman Brothers to The Grateful Dead, from The Black Crowes to Led Zep. To distill their music into a cohesive, thematic collection of songs in an album format and then to release that up on the stage, that’s been their premise, and the great expanse of their live show emanates from that intent. Fenceposts, the band’s second album release, captured the most extreme reaches of the group's studio mode of collectivism. Over the course of the 2 CD set, the music segues from subtle ambient passages of countrified jazz to thumping blues-based collages. It’s a journey through the past, an articulate grouping of instrumental wonderings and wonderful variations in a number of stylistic conventions all of which are linked together under the auspices of a concept record.
Melodic fluidity is their trademark, one that has no doubt been years in the making, and it’s that very sound coupled with the architectural song structures of their instrumental numbers that delineates the band’s overall direction most clearly. The band is possessed of its purpose, and all is channeled to an orchestrated end. Everything has its place—the introduction, the body, the conclusion. It’s this adherence to structure, this insistence on a storyline, which flusters some; it leaves unanswered the question of how to altogether aptly reckon with them. Who are they? What exactly are they doing? Classification presents some problems: Modern Bluesman? Folk and Bluegrass Expansion? Southern Rock? Grassroots? Jazz Fusion? It can be rather confusing, but no matter what camp you fall in, there is but one element that is both certain and common among the band’s descriptions: What The Peach Truck does is to build up magnificent constructs—composition and arrangement reign supreme in The Peach Truck scheme of doing things.
What they do musically is simply the culminated form of several genres, an aggregate that is very distanced from anything that might get center stage on the pop music scene. The band is less a creation of one particular genre and more an example of a group that can be rightfully taken in by three or four of them. So just what does one do with this band? What does one do when observing this sort of phenomenon? It’s simple. We categorize them as a Jam Band—almost without exception. No other scene has the lifeblood to support them. No other scene would even dare to have them.
Sun Cured Red, on the other hand, makes no bones about self-classification; they are the children of the post-Dead resurrection—those of Phish, The String Cheese Incident, and Widespread Panic. High-energy jam music is the group's solitary focus. It is their stated purpose. It is the Alpha and Omega of their existence, and with each and every show, road after road, they further the noble cause of what has become their own brand of music. 2001 brought on their studio album release of Neck, a record that wholeheartedly personifies the band. Neck is what happens when a group of talented musicians set out with an absolute conviction for its singleness of purpose: they jam.
Live onstage, Sun Cured Red displays an ample soul that’s full of rock prowess. They whip up peaks of excitement with lofty crescendos and straight-ahead thump. They thrive on the excitement and live in the moment. In many ways Sun Cured Red is a band that made a decision to begin their journey at the same place where The Peach Truck has, more or less, ended up. And now, as fate would have it, the two will travel on together, crossing the river that lies between them.
Expect expressive conversations among musicians. Expect revolving figures. Expect to see it in their faces, all ten instrumentalists finger-painting together against joyfully complex cadences. Expect colors to emerge, the crowd to roar, and an outpouring of energy to radiate from the core of the stage. Expect jazz music in a rock environment. Expect to hear the collective revelry of ten phenomenal musicians. Expect all of this and more from these two bands. Ostensibly, literally—they’ve come to jam.
So long as there are bands like The Peach Truck and Sun Cured Red, modern rock can postpone its need for immediate redemption. Reactions to the inventive ensembles of these two groups, and other bands like them, are a fair indication of the many good things to come. One might even feel predisposed to thank them, but they’d just turn around and offer it all to the fans. And that’s, perhaps, the most beautiful thing about all of this, that the jam band fans love all of its children, whether they are its direct descendents or whether they were taken in as orphans. Good music is just good music, and differences become insignificant in light of the similarities that are shared among those musicians who partake in the American Jam Band tradition. God bless them, each and every one.
Robert Cast
JamBase | Southern Style
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