Only together since 2003, New York City jam band U-Melt already has a long career’s worth of accomplishments. The quartet has played for massive crowds at The Gathering of the Vibes, the Wakarusa Music Festival, the 10,000 Lakes Music Festival and the Green Apple Festival. It has shared stages with the likes of moe. and Umphrey’s McGee. The Village Voice and New York Magazine have raved about the group’s music.
These achievements, however, represent stops along a journey, not a destination in and of itself.
“There’s so much more to accomplish,” says keyboardist/vocalist Zac Lasher. “We’re very much still in our toddler phase. This thing is just starting to get legs and walk.”
U-Melt — Lasher, Rob Salzer (guitar, vocals), George Miller (drums, vocals) and Adam Bendy (bass, vocals) — will perform Saturday night at the River Street Jazz Cafe. The show comes after the band recently concluded a successful three-week Midwest jaunt.
“More than half the places we played we had never been to before,” Lasher says of the run that brought U-Melt to Chicago, Madison, Wis., Minneapolis, Kansas, St. Louis, Mo., and Colorado. “There’s a national buzz going on with what we’re doing right now which we’ve never experienced before.”
U-Melt — short for “Unbelievable Meltdown” — released its first album, “The Unbelievable Meltdown,” in 2004. In 2006, the band returned with “The I’s Mind,” which reached No. 1 on the Jambands.com Radio Charts as the most-played album in December of 2006. Jambands.com had already named the band its “New Groove of the Month” that February.
Also in 2006, Relix Magazine and the other producers of the annual Jammy Awards tapped U-Melt to perform at the event’s official after-show party at New York’s B.B. Kings Blues Club. Jam veterans moe. selected U-Melt to open some shows, and Salzer even filled in for moe. guitarist Al Schnier while Schnier rehabbed a hand injury.
The acceptance of the jam-band community — the musicians, the fans, the press and the festival and show promoters — has certainly been a boon for the fledgling band.
“It’s only affected our career positively, that’s for certain,” Lasher says. “It continues to amaze me how responsive the industry has been to what we’re doing. When we started, we were the very definition of upstarts, and we had big goals and big plans. We were kind of going out there saying, ‘This is what we’re doing. Love it.’ We kind of had this brazen attitude about this thing, and we still do, to a degree.
“Five-hundred shows later, it humbles you to a large degree, but it’s been really interesting. We made friends with the moe. guys, and they’ve been really helpful to us, and the Jambands.com people have been really good to us from moment one.”
The members of U-Melt are all formally trained. Salzer trained on classical violin before switching to guitar, Miller studied percussion and Bendy and Lasher both studied musical performance. Lasher began playing piano at age 4 and also studied theatre at Emerson College in Boston.
The theatre background has given Lasher and his bandmates a sense of stagecraft that goes beyond simply playing their songs.
“We want to put on really huge rock shows,” Lasher explains. “Ultimately, that’s what it’s about. We want to put on big rock shows with big production and have it be an experience. We’ve started to incorporate a video element to some of our bigger shows, incorporated ideas about production values into our bigger shows.”
A few of those bigger shows are on the horizon for U-Melt, which will play a two-night stand at Sullivan Hall in its New York stomping grounds in late March. The band also has a 4-week Thursday night residency lined up at Boston’s Paradise Lounge.
Bands like U-Melt are part of a jam-band scene that is very different since Phish, the only true jam-band to sell out arenas since the Grateful Dead, broke up in 2004.
“The main difference right now is there isn’t a juggernaut,” Lasher says. “There isn’t a Grateful Dead or a Phish. It’s kind of fractured the scene, and I think at the same time it’s good for the scene. It makes it more diverse. … I think it’s become a bunch of different little communities instead of one giant community. I definitely think it has its good points. I think it’s probably better for the music.”
w
go:
Who: U-Melt
Where: River Street Jazz Caf� (665 N. River St., Plains)
When: Sat. Feb. 23, doors 9 p.m., show 10 p.m.
Tickets: $8
Info: 570.822.2992,