The Mitch Rutman Group plays well with others
by Leslie Wylie
After years of catering for major-league rock 'n' roll tours, Mitch Rutman could probably tell you how Bob Dylan takes his coffee and whether Neil Young prefers his eggs scrambled or fried. But if you really want a good story, ask him about being a roadie for the Dave Matthews Band.
"Oh, David," he sighs nonchalantly, then laughs. Rutman isn't kidding about knowing the jam-band maverick on a first name basis, but the story that follows does seem almost too unlikely to be true.
"While I was with them on the road, every day I was working for other musicians knowing that I'm a musician myself, and every now and then it started to get to me," Rutman says.
The winds shifted one fateful day when Matthews approached Rutman and asked him if he'd like to sit in with the band. Rutman, like any guitarist in his right mind, said yes and subsequently found himself on stage in front of 23,000 people. One show led to another, but maintaining the duality of crew by day, supporting cast in a rock-star dream by night made him think twice about his lifestyle. Sitting in was great fun, but he never expected to get the gig full time.
"It was the coolest thing I've ever done, but the next day it was always just back to work," he says. "I was getting a small taste of what it's like to play with a professional band, and more and more I was thinking that I want to do this, I love this, I love Dave, I love the band, I love everyone I work with, but I need to get off the road and see what I can do with my own music."
So he did. Back in Knoxville, Rutman borrowed musicians from every corner of the local music community—keyboardist Ben Maney, bassist Vince Ilagan and drummer Chad Melton, each of whom Rutman says are involved in "too many bands to name"—to shape the collective that they refer to as the Mitch Rutman Group.
Rutman explains that the band benefits from its members' cross-pollination.
"It's actually kind of cool because everybody brings a little bit of something to the band. They kind of go away for a little while and come back with new stuff," he says.
The band gave Rutman an excuse to dust off his background in music theory and songwriting and put it to use. He was thrilled to hear his own compositions, some of them 15 years old, performed by musicians he admired.
At the core of the MRG's sound is a kind of all-original, all-instrumental contemporary jazz, minus the slick elevator-pop connotations that the genre attracts—"We're the anti-Kenny G," Rutman laughs. With Latin, funk, reggae and hip-hop overtones tossed into the mix, the band might be located somewhere between Galactic and Widespread Panic on the salad bar of groove-oriented music. The extra ingredients set MRG apart from its classical jazz cousins, along with Rutman's insistence that the music be easy to digest.
"I'm not a big fan of challenging an audience cerebrally. I don't want people to have to work too hard; I want people to get up and dance," he says. "If they start dropping like flies because we've lost them because they're thinking too hard, the rhythms are too complex, or the music is too cacophonous, then I feel like I'm losing sight of what I want to get out of this."
The Mitch Rutman Band has been known to season its shows with the talent of other local musicians. Depending on who's hanging around on a particular night, it's not unusual for Rutman to extend the microphone to Jodie Manross, Mike Crawley and other friends. (Rutman also regularly teams up with Mike Thomas, sans band.)
"For musicians, it's an interesting challenge to have someone that you're not normally playing with all of a sudden sitting in with your band. The songs that you're playing over and over again all of a sudden have a new twist to them," he says.
Rutman is intrigued by the permeability of music, how the chemistry of a band can be completely altered by adding a single different element: "You can have a blues singer sitting in with a serious jazz band and suddenly the jazz band is playing blues, or you can have a percussionist sitting in with a rock 'n' roll band and now the rock band is playing Latin music."
Although music science is Rutman's passion, there's nothing formulaic about his karma-esque perpetuation of the question that got him off the tour bus and into a band of his own.
"It becomes a, 'Dude, any time you're here, sit in with the band,' and just spreads," he says. "I think that happens any time you have a music community, whether it's in Knoxville or New York City. It's just fun."
October 2, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 40
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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