Umphrey's McGee

Umphrey's McGee first assembled in South Bend, Indiana during the closing years of the 1990s. The group soon carved out a prominent place on the domestic jam-band circuit, earning recognition for its unusually ambitious and stylistically wide-ranging approach. Its volatile blend of funk, metal, progressive rock, electronic textures, jazz, and folk has surfaced across a long sequence of concert and studio recordings, among them the 2006 album Safety in Numbers and the boldly experimental Mantis from 2009. From the outset the band cultivated a fiercely loyal, self-sustaining following by experimenting with fresh ways to deliver its music, most notably by supplying concert recordings to listeners right after each performance and by launching an annual Hall of Fame series that lets fans select standout shows for a year-end live collection. Throughout the 2010s the ensemble sustained its momentum, cutting one album inside the historic Abbey Road Studios in London and unveiling the paired 2018 releases It's Not Us and It's You; two years later the reflective Asking for a Friend arrived.

The original lineup—keyboardist Joel Cummins, guitarist Brendan Bayliss, bassist Ryan Stasik, and drummer Mike Mirro—had already performed in separate projects around the Notre Dame campus when the four musicians united in December 1997, taking their name from one of Bayliss’s relatives. With an established national infrastructure for jam bands already in place, they began circulating live tapes at once; the studio debut Greatest Hits, Vol. 3 followed in 1998 and broadened their reach. After several members graduated, the group adopted a more intensive rehearsal routine, then documented its first live album, Songs for Older Women, in 1999—the same recording that introduced percussionist Andy Farag. In 2000 the band expanded to a sextet by adding singer-guitarist Jake Cinninger, formerly of the South Bend outfit Ali Babba’s Tahini, and relocated to Chicago. From that base the musicians mounted two-week regional tours, occasionally venturing farther afield and sharing bills with Dr. Didg (Graham Wiggins), harmonica specialist Sugar Blue, Béla Fleck, Topaz, and additional guests.

Following the live set One Fat Sucka in 2000, Umphrey’s McGee delivered the more decisive studio statement Local Band Does O.K. in 2002; the next year brought both their debut DVD, Live from the Lake Coast, and the replacement of founding drummer Mirro by jazz percussionist Kris Myers, whose first appearance came on Local Band Does OKlahoma. Anchor Drops, the third studio album, surfaced in 2004 on SCI Fidelity, the label operated by the String Cheese Incident, while the second DVD, Wrapped Around Chicago: New Years at the Riv, appeared in 2005. Safety in Numbers, issued in 2006, became the band’s first entry on Billboard’s album chart; around the same time the group performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live! alongside Huey Lewis and maintained a busy festival schedule. Material left over from those sessions formed the 2007 release The Bottom Half, which shared the year with the well-received concert document Live at the Murat. Mantis arrived early in 2009 and surpassed its predecessor on the charts. The 2011 album Death by Stereo, produced by Manny Sanchez and Kevin Browning, combined fresh originals with longstanding live favorites.

Similar Skin, released in 2014, steered a progressive path through 1980s rock and metal and achieved the group’s highest chart position yet. A single day of recording at Abbey Road that June yielded The London Session, a collection of new pieces, previously unrecorded road-tested songs, rearranged older material, and a version of the Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” which reached stores in April 2015. Since roughly 2008 the band has marked each Halloween with elaborate mash-ups pairing its own compositions with well-known tracks from virtually every style; those experiments reached a studio audience in 2016 as Zonkey. After the 2017 concert recording Live from Missoula, MT, the next pair of studio albums appeared in rapid succession—It's Not Us in January 2018 and It's You the following May. You Walked Up Shaking in Your Boots But You Stood Tall and Left a Raging Bull followed in 2021, with Asking for a Friend emerging the next year.