Today we look back to the August-September 2002 issue of Relix and this feature on Page McConnell’s Vida Blue project with Oteil Burbridge and Russell Batiste.

It was September 16, 2001 – “that” week – when an unnamed trio consisting of keyboardist-bandleader Page McConnell, bassist Oteil Burbridge and drummer Russell Batiste entered Piety Street Recording, located in New Orleans’ ragged but righteous ninth ward, with the goal of cutting an album in six days. City hotels were uncharacteristically empty during their stay, and the French Quarter was devoid of the merrymakers who’ve gradually transformed Bourbon Street from a jazz Mecca into a binge drinker’s paradise. “It was pretty weird,” McConnell recalls. “We were supposed to start recording on the 15th, but all the airports were still shut down. It was a strange time to be away from home and in New Orleans. It was therapeutic to be in the studio and making music.”

The band acquired a sporty new moniker – Vida Blue – a few months later. It’s also the title of their swank new album, a mixture of heady electronica and bootstrap techno, greasy funk, slippery jazz textures and subtle suburban soul. Mostly instrumental, with a few McConnell vocals not unreminiscent of his laid-back approach to Phish’s “Strange Design,” Vida Blue arrives just as both keyboard trios and ‘80s electronic music are enjoying revivals. The group made its live debut with two shows at the end of last year, played a handful of dates this spring, and hit the major markets this summer following the album’s June release.

Back in the saddle again, Phish’s “Chairman of the Boards” found himself unemployed when the quartet decided to put the group on hold as of October 2000 in order to pursue individual interests, both musical and personal. But unlike Trey, who can throw a band together faster than most people can make a sandwich, or Jon Fishman, who drums with Pork Tornado and Jazz Mandolin Project, or filmmaker-bassist Mike Gordon, McConnell had rarely worked outside Phish, his first and only band to date.

McConnell realized he needed to dive into another project or assemble a band as soon as Phish stopped playing. “I really wanted to do something on my own,” he says, “but it took me about a year to figure out what I wanted to do on my first project outside Phish, or who I wanted to work with.”

He made lists of musicians he admired as possible colleagues. Then in April 2001 he caught two Allman Brothers Band shows at the Beacon Theatre in New York, and paid particular attention to Oteil Burbridge,with whom he’d long been friendly.A couple of weeks later, he saw the funky Meters at Irving Plaza and asked drummer Russell Batiste if he might be interested in doing something sometime.

“That’s when the light bulb went on,” McConnell says.

McConnell, Batiste, and Burbridge spent their first day in the studio just setting up. They played together for the very first time that evening during Batiste’s regular Monday-night gig at the Maple Leaf with the group Papa Grows Funk. Upon returning to the studio the next day, the trio began alternating agenda-free jamming with run-throughs of a few songs Page had brought down with him. The goal was to allow the creative juices of three deeply experienced musicians of different musical backgrounds to coalesce into something unique. So while the chord progressions and melodies for the songs that became “Electra Glide,” “Who’s Laughing Now” and “Final Flight” were in hand, the rest of the album, Page says, “was improvised, created on the spot.”

“When I put the band together, I didn’t know what it would be at all,” McConnell insists. “And I had no preconceptions about how the album would sound other than thinking our chemistry would be good. All I knew was that I wanted to do something that wasn’t completely piano- or organ-based. Much of what I did with Phish was played on grand piano and Hammond organ, and I wanted to spend time on other keyboards.”

If Page is the band’s cool head, the drummer is its trickster god. David Russell Batiste Jr., 36, is a capitol-C Character, whose outgoing personality comes through loud and clear over a thousand miles of fiber-optic cable.

In addition to Papa Grows Funk, Batiste also drums regularly with family band the Batiste Brothers and his own Orchestra in da Hood. In 1989 he replaced Zigaboo Modeliste in the Meters, the funkiest band in New Orleans history and, possibly, the world. He has recorded with Allan Toussaint, Robbie Robertson and Harry Connick Jr. as a session drummer. He’s at work on the follow-up to his 2000 album, Orchestra in da Hood, a highly eclectic journey through the mind of a drummer with a surprisingly sophisticated sense of melody. McConnell and Russell met as members of oneoff group the Gyptians (along with Meters keyboardist Art Neville and bassists George Porter and Mike Gordon), who recorded the title track for Get You a Healin’, a benefit album for the New Orleans Musicians Clinic.

Batiste has a special message for Relix readers: “Russell loves to smoke a lot,” he says, referring to himself in the third person, “so feel free to put it in his hands. I showed Page a new meaning of smokin’ blunts. That’s why we got along.We’re basically on the same level all the time, bro, ya know what I’m sayin’?”

“I worry about Russell if this band gets big,” laughs Page, before gracing me with a couple of unprintable stories about Batiste’s larger-than-life personality.

Batiste’s culinary preference inspired both the title and content of the Vida Bluetrack, “Where’s Popeyes,” which sounds like a techno rek through New Orleans’ back streets. “They asked me what kind f food I liked when I got on the road, and I told ‘em the first thing fuckin’ do when I get off the plane or bus is ask, ‘Where’s Popeyes?’ ’m from New Orleans, man. I got to have that flava wherever I go.”

“It’s the first question he asks in New Orleans, too,” adds a disbelieving Oteil Burbridge, who comes off as levelheaded as Batiste is haywire. Burbridge recalls a night on the tour bus when he invited Page to join him in checking out a new comedy album he’d recently bought. “Page said,‘You know,Oteil, I’d really rather sit here in the back lounge and just watch Russell.‘And I said,‘You know what? You’re right. That’ll be at least as funny as listening to Richard Pryor.’ So we sat back there and listened to Russell rant all night long, laughing our heads off.And that’s what the sessions were like. Being with Russell is like being with Robin Williams. From the first minute you see him until he leaves, it’s constant show.”

Oteil, 37, and Page, 39, met more than a decade ago. Oteil, who played bass in Col. Bruce Hampton’s Aquarium Rescue Unit, often found himself hanging out with Page when their respective bands shared a bill. Asked to characterize Vida Blue, Oteil finds himself at a loss for words. “But that’s been the case with every band I’ve played in since 1988,” he laughs. “It’s more about how the individual players’ personalities fit together than it is the style.”

I asked Batiste how easy it was to hook up with an unfamiliar bassist for the first time with the studio meter running – and got an earful in return. “Dude,” he replied, “I’m Russell Batiste. Don’t forget that, hear? I’ll hook up with Jesus Christ if you put a bass in his hand. The show is goin’ down .”

Burbridge’s melodically inventive playing (he claims drummer Elvin Jones as his major musical influence) meshes perfectly with Batiste’s solid flexibility. Oteil, who shares with Batiste a background in jazz, funk, Latin, blues, more funk, and more jazz, felt right at home. “Me and Russell would end up playing the same licks at the same time. Usually it takes a good while before that starts to happen, but it was pretty much immediate with him. We’d just crack up laughing.” It’s been said a million times before, but the secret talent that separates good improvisers from great improvisers is an ability to listen. “Russell may take off on some other orbit,” Oteil says, “but he’s not missing anything else the other players are doing.He can shift gears on a dime and incorporate it into whatever side road he’s heading down.”

While Vida Blue is only Page’s second band, ever, Oteil can’t count the groups he’s played in.Along with the Allmans ( “I think the band has found its joy again” ) and Vida Blue, the Birmingham resident leads his own group, the Peacemakers (whose second album will soon be out on veteran jazz producer John Snyder’s Artist House label), which he has described as “jazzy Jesus funk.” What he enjoys most in Vida Blue is its liberating looseness. “I’ve never been in a band that would just get out there and free-style it,” he says.

The show went down on day three, when the group hooked up big-time on the jam that became “CJ3,” Vida Blue’s 13-minute instrumental centerpiece. The rambling, exploratory track embraces both earthy funk and cosmic fire, and exemplifies what Batiste means when he explains that, “We’re not just taking a song and going off with it. We’re experimenting on what we’d like to hear in a song.”

The group continued to alternate spontaneous jams with work on the three songs that form the album’s lyrical core. Longtime Phish engineer John Siket was at the mixing board throughout, and Page compares the recording process to Phish’s The Siket Disc, whose tracks he cherry-picked from hours of studio jamming, and Story of the Ghost, some of whose tracks originated as studio jams. Page enjoyed his new role as bandleader, except when the tape stopped. “Everybody would look at me and ask, ‘What are we going to do next?’ And I’d have no idea,” he laughs.

Although some songs have a definite techno feel, thanks to the broad sonic potential of his Alesis Andromeda analog synthesizer, Page insists he’s never paid much attention to the genre. The rest of McConnell’s keyboard arsenal consists of grand piano,Hammond organ, clavinet, Fender Rhodes electric piano, Wurlitzer, Yamaha CS60 and PSR-540 synths, seventies Korg Vocoder and a Ragini electric tanpura (an Indian droning instrument). “Final Flight,” the album’s closer, sounds like the finest song Brian Eno left off of his electropop masterpiece, Another Green World.

The trio needed a name after booking its debut gigs – December 30, 2001, at Page’s hometown club Higher Ground in Burlington, Vermont, and the next night at Roseland in New York. Page found it in the lyrics to “Electra Glide,” settling upon Oakland A’s pitching star Vida Blue, who works in the San Francisco Giants’ front office, for at least two reasons. “First, I always thought he had a great name. He was a young and amazingly smooth pitcher who embodied much of what was going on in the seventies that influenced us, such as the Miles Davis electric bands I listened to so much. Second, he was an amazing technician, and there’s some of that in the band, especially with Russell and Oteil.”

Wasn’t there a midwestern hardcore band called Vida Blue? " The Vida Blue," Page corrects me. “And there used to be until I bought the name from them.”

Page’s first lyrics appear in the gorgeous track “Electra Glide.” They may not directly concern his experience with Phish, and yet … well, you decide: “But the magical experience won’t last/We linger on, time passes by/ You can hang on, but the harder you try, the less you enjoy – hold on tight.” They remind me of Phish lyricist Tom Marshall’s writing voice, which McConnell takes as a compliment. “I thought of Tom a lot as I was writing lyrics,” he says.

Page misses playing with Phish “immensely, and intensely,” he says. But on a personal level, “I’m as close, and in some ways closer, to those guys now as I’ve ever been.” Having enjoyed Phish’s heightened level of musical communication for seventeen years, I wonder if the experience might have spoiled him for other collaborations. “We really worked to make it what it was, although we probably didn’t realize how lucky we were at the time.” Pause. “We did know how lucky we were, but it’s still hardto conceive of how cool it was. Over time I’ve been able to appreciate the situation’s uniqueness and how intense and special it was.”

Any regrets about the hiatus? “Not a single one. It was the right thing to do no matter what happened afterward. We all knew it. Nobody felt as though it were a bad or a weird thing at all.” Could he predict if/when the band will reunite? “I couldn’t put odds on anything like that except to say that I really think we’re going to get back together, and I really hope we do. I think we all want to get back together.”

And why not give Russell Batiste the last word? “I told Page that when they put Phish back together, I want to play percussion.”