“Breaking rules tends to be a lot more meaningful and fun if you know the rule you’re breaking,” said Jordan Wilkow, keyboardist and singer for Family Groove Company.
If a band wants to improvise, nothing can replace spending many hours honing the standards and rules of playing music. Chicago’s Family Groove Company has raised the bar for bands who think “just jamming” is easy, having spent much time learning the rules of rigidly composed music before they began improvising together.
The group has a genuine grasp of tight, jazzy groove playing, hard danceable funk and even a skill for warm pop. Their take on Miles Davis’ “So What”–set to a hard, Meters-like funk beat instead of swing–is an example of the band’s ability to blend jazz, funk and rock as well as fuse composed sections with open-minded improvisation.
“Active listening is essential,” Wilkow said. “That, and an unwavering commitment to the vitality of the whole, as opposed to one’s individual contribution. So one often finds his contribution to the group effort not proactively, as in ‘What can I do to take us where I want to go?’ but reactively, as in, ‘What do I hear that makes me want to play?’ “
Family Groove Company began its path at Highland Park High School, where Wilkow first met guitarist and vocalist Adam Lewis. Wilkow and Lewis enrolled in the Musicians Institute in Hollywood after college, where they would meet the solid rhythm section of Mattias Blanck on drums and Janis Wallin on bass. Wallin has played piano since the age of 6 and learned guitar before moving to the bass. Blanck, born in Helsinborn, Sweden, brought a prestigious presence to the band, having served as director of the Swedish Army Drum Corps before moving to Los Angeles.
“It’s a pleasure to watch Janis and Mattias work together,” Wilkow said. “Her sensitivity and listening skills have resulted in her setting the bar awfully high when it comes to drummers. But it was pretty clear from the beginning that Mattias was more than capable. They both have a precise sensitivity to the tightness of the ensemble, and to the overall feel of the groove that, in many ways, had Adam and I playing catch up.”
After finishing school, the band started playing regular shows in L.A., and later trekked up the west coast to play in Oregon. In October 2002, they came back to Chicago, where Lewis’ and Wilkow’s friends and family helped the group get established.
Since then, they have traveled as far east as New York and as far south as Alabama, and played many festivals, including Summercamp in Lake Chillicothe and 10,000 Lakes in Detroit Lakes, Minn.
Their music has traveled even farther than that, thanks to grass-roots publicity and the leaps of digital technology and the Internet in recent years.
“Digital recording technology has made making records much more affordable, and the Internet allows one to make music available almost anywhere in the world at the touch of a button,” Wilkow said. “So the big record companies have really lost their monopoly on commercially successful music acts, and the jam band scene, as it’s come to be known, is a remarkably vibrant example of that.”
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Family Groove Company
When: 9 p.m. Friday
Where: Heartland Cafe, 7000 N. Glenwood Ave.
Tickets: $7
Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com) and Kris Karnopp (kkarnopp@tribune.com)
