United they expand

“If you ever get lonely, go to the record store and visit your friends.”

If you know who said this (rock critic Lester Bangs), you’re probably over 40, and it’s likely you still call CDs “records.” You might even be old enough to be Uncle Harlen’s Band’s parents—the quartet’s average age is 22. That the band was conceived in 1995, when co-founders Sean Lehe and Jeff Coleman were in the latter stages of fast times at Christian Brothers High School, gives ironic insight into Coleman’s shy comment about their earlier musical training. “Well,” he says, “we’re not really old enough to have backgrounds in music.”

Coulda fooled me. Guitarist Sean Lehe’s supremely confident and inventive melodic and rhythmic vocabulary easily makes him one of the young stars in California’s jazz/rock music and jam-band scene. His friend, foil and sometimes dual-lead-line colleague, keyboardist Jeff Coleman, plays in a style reminiscent of the intelligent, jazzy Americana piano man Bruce Hornsby. These two met onstage at a noontime pep rally playing “Johnny B. Goode.” Back then, their record-store friends were the improvisatory bands that form jam-rock’s Rosetta Stone. “We listened to the Allman Brothers, the Grateful Dead, Santana and Phish,” Coleman recalls. “As we’ve gotten older, we’re listening also to serious jazz.”

Coleman is serious but affable. “The jam band thing is kinda something we’ve always been categorized as, but we didn’t set out to be a part of it,” he explains. “We’ve always innately been into improvising, which is one thing that defines the jam-band thing. It doesn’t have the typical sound of jazz—but in a lot of ways it is the same; it’s playing a composition with a set melody and then taking time to improvise, and then coming back to the set melody. Take any kind of music you want and apply that format to it—it can be reggae, hip-hop, R&B. Bands have the freedom to stretch.”

Since 1996, UHB has released three albums, the most recent being 2000’s fine effort, Sparked. The band’s recorded sound has evolved from an early Allmans-esque approach to include dynamic groove and trance-musical explorations, with Lehe and Coleman’s palette of aural effects painting expansive, yet muscular West Coast soundscapes. All three albums contain original works, the notable exception being UHB’s take on Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash’s keening “Girl From the North Country.” The band’s confessional writing highlights its connection to a natural world, a belief in family and hope.

“Peace through music” is the phrase that crops up on UHB’s Web site, and it underpins Coleman’s nature. “Seeing Bob Dylan here recently was pretty amazing,” he says. “There were people outside that concert with protest signs—right-wing God people. He sang ‘Masters of War,’ a total antiwar song, and then two songs later he played a song about a soldier’s mother crying because her son was leaving for war. I just wish people would pay more attention to music like that—he was trying to present all sides of it from a human aspect, regardless of what side you are on.”

UHB’s young rhythm section features drummer Zach Hash, 22, and bassist Brian Rodgers, 18. Hash completed a four-year residency at UC Davis with free-jazz legend John Tchicai, a 60-year-old Danish-Congolese sax player who played with John Coltrane. Rodgers, says Coleman, “just graduated from McClatchy High last year and is just kind of a prodigy—an incredible singer who plays drums and bass. He’s the drummer on Forever Goldrush’s latest album. He’s new, but I think he’s gonna be well known soon enough!”

Coleman looks ahead with grace. “As the band gets older, so do our fans,” he says, “and then they have kids and so on—organic! As far as our career goes, we just want to make a modest living. As artists, we want to inspire people to be creative and respect themselves, just by doing that ourselves.”