Umphrey's McGee overloads the senses

The six-member jam band Umphrey's McGee will bring its improvisational style of prog rock to The NorVa on Saturday.

The members began playing together while they were students at Notre Dame. In 2000 they decided to make a career out of music and moved to Chicago.

"We felt it was a bit more of a cultural place to be," said founding member Joel Cummins, who spoke by phone from a tour stop in Northampton, Mass. "That's where we set up shop and worked on our sound over the years."

Their music has been called improvisational and innovative, and that suits Cummins just fine.

"Multifaceted" is another word the keyboardist would like associated with the band and its recent album, "Death by Stereo."

The CD's first two songs - "Miami Virtue" and "Domino Theory" - showcase a synth-oriented sound, which is new territory for the band, Cummins said.

"We went into the studio and kind of took a little bit of a Talking Heads approach," he said.

Umphrey's McGee is known as a guitar-driven band, but three members hit the keyboards to come up with the sound structure for "Miami Virtue."

The band had used a heavy keyboard approach with some instrumental tracks in the past, but "Virtue" was its first synth-heavy number that featured vocals.

On "Domino Theory," listeners can hear the influence of Pearl Jam, The Clash and, again, Talking Heads.

The new styles are part of the band's philosophy. With more than 130 compositions in its music library, the group is all about "not re-creating the same song," Cummins said.

During live shows, Umphrey's McGee often deconstructs the arrangements used on its recordings, which gives its concerts an improvisational feel.

"We might put one song in the middle of another song or play the first half of a song and break it up and play the last half later in the show," Cummins said.

The band also offers what Cummins described as a "pretty big light show," which gives audience members "visual analogies" to connect to the music.

"It's definitely a sensory overload," he said. "The live show is very dance-oriented. It's not a come-and-sit-and-watch-the-show sort of thing."

Patty Jenkins, (757) 446-2298, patty.jenkins@pilotonline.com