The String Cheese Incident
@ The Zodiac, Oxford
03.04.04
www.vanguard-online.co.uk

The String Cheese Incident are three different bands, ever changing and unpredictable. Perhaps the only predictable thing is that they will play at least two and a half hours and they will have a crowd of dancing hippies in tow. It's a safe place to be how you want to be for an evening and to indulge in recreational chemistry, if that is your thing... Cheese goes very well with mushrooms. And you just have to bring an open set of ears. Tunes are long and jammed out over ten or fifteen minutes, requiring you to listen and savour. Tonight they were a jazz band - each instrument taking a different part to build a complexly shifting whole. Sometimes the piano leads with Kyle Hollingworth's cheesy grin, mouthing the notes as he plays; sometimes the mandolin, diminutive Michael Kang grinning too and doing a little jive. The bass grooves in a deep and feet-moving way, while the drummer is tighter than a whippet's hamstrings, head flicking metronomically as he hits a run. Bill Nershi fills in with bendy acoustic guitar solos.

Jam bands are a contemporary American phenomenon. A response to the commercialisation and co-option of music by business, they run to a different paradigm, selling records direct, selling their own tickets, selling recordings of their concerts by digital download. And by consensus they are a friendly community, formed by people with little in common but a taste in music. Like glaciers, we know where they have come from and that they will be around next year, so people discuss them as they would the weather - what are they like today, predictions as to tomorrow. The SCI this year is not the SCI next year.

The jazz turns into a trancey house groove and becomes dark and repetitive. Almost the Afro Celt Sound System except the SCI play different parts rather than the Irish tradition of all playing the same part together. The floor is bouncing up and down as the front rows shake it down. The band shift to a calypso, to a salsa, to something metallic. It almost doesn't matter what material they start with - somewhere, five minutes in, they will turn a corner and ramp it up or down to another place entirely, taking the audience with them. They go into a cover of Talking Heads' This Must Be The Place and two hours of dancing have put me into a suggestible trance - I can hear the lyric speaking directly to me, to my life.

Music should do that.

A remarkable night out for the open-minded.

Ross McGibbon