Dave Matthews Band

Dave Matthews Band , cosmopolitan roots rock band; formed Charlottesville, Va., 1991. MEMBERSHIP : Dave Matthews, voc., gtr. (b. Johannesburg, South Af-rica, Jan. 9,1967); Boyd Tinsley, vln.; LeRoi Moore, sax.; Stefan Lessard, bs.; Carter Beauford, drm.

Dave Matthews, a regular-joe musician who initially played clubs on the Univ. of Va. campus, has used constant touring and a hypnotic jazz-rock sound to become one of the biggest rock stars of recent years. At age two, he and his family moved from racially divided Johannesburg to the N.Y.C. suburb of Yorktown Heights. After relocating to Charlottesville as an adult, he put together a band, picking up Carter Beauford and LeRoi Moore (regular performers at Miller’s, a jazz club where Matthews tended bar), then-16-year-old bass prodigy Stefan Lessard, and violinist Boyd Tinsley. Dave Matthews Band played its first gig in front of 40 people on May 11, 1991, on the roof of a Charlottesville apartment building. After performing as part of a 1991 Earth Day festival, the band found a permanent place to play: the Eastern Standard, a small restaurant, on Tuesday nights. Eventually, the band moved on to a club called Trax and its Tuesday night shows became a “must see.” Because the band allows fans to tape shows, Dave Matthews Band’s first recordings were bootlegs; its first official album was the live Remember Two Things. From those small beginnings, DMB won opening concert slots from fellow jam-rockers such as The Samples, then made smash hits out of catchy, bouncy numbers from its breakthrough 1994 album, Under the Table and Dreaming. Ambitious but unpretentious, Matthews’s open-minded music found its moment with later- 1990s youth’s peace-craving outlook and genre-crossing tastes, and the band has been turning arenas and stadia into the intimate clubs of their ascension ever since.

Discography

Remember Two Things (1993); Under the Table and Dreaming (1994); Crash (1996); Live at Red Rocks 8.15.95 (1997); Before These Crowded Streets (1998); Listener Supported (1999). DAVE MATTHEWS AND TIM REYNOLDS:Live at Luther College (1999).