The String Cheese Incident and the Wood Brothers couldn’t be more different, yet the sonic globetrotting of the Cheese and rooted Americana of the Woods were supremely simpatico on opening night 2025 at the Rose Music Center in suburban Dayton, Ohio. 

The May 18 gig before a wildly enthusiastic audience marked the finale of the groups’ three-show run together and featured a one-song Wood Brothers Incident in the form of a funked-up rendition of Allen Toussaint’s “Get Out My Life Woman.”

With Chris Wood on cowbell and vocals, Jano Rix on keys and vocals and Oliver Wood on guitar and vocals while acting as onstage traffic cop cuing solos and verses, the temporary nonet sparked joyful pandemonium that carried through the balance of SCI’s two-hour, 50-minute headlining slot that unfolded over two sets of roughly equal duration.  

Think the Jerry Garcia Band orbiting Pluto. 

The Brothers Wood performed an 11-song dinnertime set that ran from precisely 6:01-7 p.m. Playing in broad daylight, the Brothers – Chris (double bass, Höfner electric bass and harmonica), Oliver (acoustic, electric guitars) and Rix, who played drums and keys simultaneously; melodica; and his custom shuitar, offered both their nontraditional take on electric rock-and-roll with “Alabaster,” set up like a power trio, and their nontraditional take on twisted folk with “Heartbreak Lullaby,” with all three players up front. 

Blood-kin harmonies, Chris Wood’s dancing with the bass he makes sing, Rix’s unique percussive effects and Oliver Wood’s quirky lyrics and delivery were, as always, the trademark of this truncated revue. 

Focused and sharp, the Woods set the table for Cheese, who responded  with an energetic, funk-laden display bathed in gentle primary colors and harsh, strobing white lights that accentuated a sonic trip from the sextet’s Boulder, Colo., home base to South African indestructible beats to Jamaican reggae to underground-Chicago house pulsations to Bakersfield twang to Macon, Ga., and the Allman Brothers Band’s “Revival,” which closed the opening set. 

Thirty-two years on, and in their 50s and 60s, the individual Cheeses are as energetic as ever with intuitive interplay that comes only with time. Anchored by bassist Keith Moseley and drummer Michael Travis, keyboardist Kyle Hollingsworth, who always appears in ecstasy as he mouths the notes he fingers; acoustic/electric guitarist and Garth Hudson-lookalike Bill Nershi; the monstrous Michael Kang (guitar, fiddle); and percussionist Jason Hann, who colors the music with sticks, mallets and hands on everything from a small kit to chimes, washboard and triangle, String Cheese is purposeful rather than incidental. 

The result was music as transportation as the band lit into expansive improvisations that always had direction and never hit a cul-de-sac whether on the bluegrass-leaning “Way Back When” or the psych-trance of “Tripping the Light Fantastic.” That everyone save Hann sings lead – and they all got to shine at the mic on the revved-up hoedown-on-the-beach mashup that was the encore of “I Know You Rider” – only added to this small-“i” incident’s incendiary impact. 

And they are so tight, the final note faded as the 11 p.m. curfew descended on the audience which hadn’t shrunk at all over the previous five hours.