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In the basement of Crater on Saturday night, a student-run music venue, a crowd of students huddled around a makeshift stage as the first guitar chord of Hydrogen’s set rang out. When the band was still playing their first song 10 minutes later, some audience members looked at each other unexpectedly while others grooved to the music.

“So many times somebody will come to a house show not knowing what bands are playing, and if we happen to be on that bill, they’re just like, ‘what the f*ck am I listening to right now?’” Michael Brodsky, lead vocalist and guitarist, said.

Consisting of Brodsky, drummer Dominic Colucci, bassist Jacob Cotton and keyboardist Ethan Girtz, the jam band plays psychedelic rock music with elements of funk and jazz. Along with covers, the band incorporates long-form improvisation into their sets, inspired by their favorite bands the Grateful Dead and Phish.

When picking a name for the band, Brodsky said he wanted to pay homage to a band they love without overtly sounding like a cover band. They eventually settled on Hydrogen, inspired by a Phish song titled, “I Am Hydrogen.”

The musicians met through mutual friends from a band called Pop Culture on campus. After bonding over their shared love of psychedelic rock, they were inspired to start playing similar music together last fall. Brodsky and Cotton saw Phish in concert 10 times last summer, which only strengthened their love for the band.

Improvisation adds originality to the cover band’s performances. Brodsky said the band covers songs until the end of the last verse before changing up the chord structure and tempo. For the rest of the performance, the band improvises so the song is unrecognizable, and then gradually re-incorporates elements of the song until they’ve circled back to the original.

Christian Calabrese | Staff Photographer

Hydrogen bandmates take the stage. The group played covers of songs by their favorite bands and incorporated improvised notes.

“We’ll be improvising for 10 minutes long and it’s hard to remember,” Brodsky said. “We’re just making sh*t up at that point. It’s not really a song. It’s just playing music.”

The band members’ connections with each other help their improvisation. Cotton said listening to each member play and learning their style improves the band’s synchronization.

“Once you start to learn each other’s techniques, you can really just bounce ideas off each other,” Cotton said. “It starts to become like a conversation.”

In one set, Girtz may play a pattern of notes on the keyboard, which will inspire Brodsky to strum a certain complementing chord, which then inspires Colucci to do a drum fill that compliments what the two of them played, and the music evolves from there.

While the band takes cues from each other, Brodsky said long-form improvisation is risky in a live performance given that approximately 70% of their set is unplanned and unrehearsed. He said it’s easy to get lost in a song when you’re making it up, which can lead the performance awry.

“Sometimes we get just as lost as the audiences,” Cotton said. “Other times, we know secrets (the audience) don’t. It all correlates — what we do and what the audience does. It’s like a feedback loop.”

This connection with the audience is valuable, as it guides band members through the improvisation and motivates them to play better. In an intimate venue where the audience can feel each other’s breath, the raw energy of the crowd makes all the difference for Hydrogen.

Christian Calabrese | Staff Photographer

Ethan Girtz, keyboardist, and Jacob Cotton, bassist, performed for a cheering crowd Saturday night at Crater.

Kit Cassat, a friend of the band who attended Saturday’s show, said Hydrogen’s combination of improvisation and psychedelic rock makes the band stand out from others in Syracuse University’s student music scene.

“It’s a genre you wouldn’t usually see represented in a smaller setting, and they give it a great representation because they all genuinely love the music that they play,” Cassat said.

Colucci echoed Cassat and said house shows he’s attended at other universities lacked the energy he finds in the University Neighborhood. The band hopes this enthusiasm for live music continues.

Although Brodsky is set to graduate this spring, he’s still incorporating the band’s future into his plans. He said the band is saving their namesake song, “I Am Hydrogen,” for a special moment and will likely play it for their last show on campus.

“We do something nobody else does,” Brodsky said. “We’re entirely unique in terms of what the Syracuse campus house show scene has done. We’re the only band that’s a jam band, nobody else does it.”

Published on October 21, 2024 at 10:25 pm

Contact: Jepryor@syr.edu