The Slip's ever-evolving, absorbing melange of jazz, world, funk, pop and groove sounds has firmly entrenched the trio within the realm of those bands that command multiple-night attendance. Listeners who see the group on consecutive evenings typically discover far more than a different setlist, they also often find varied moods, textures and a seemingly-reconfigured sonic sensibility. The Slip is a band that fully embraces the ethos of improvisation. The group's fervor for spontaneity and creativity has yielded a flourishing fan base and critical approbation.

While the band continues to win supporters on the strength of its live performance, many of the group's fans forged meaningful, lasting connections through The Slip's first studio release, From The Gecko. On June 20, more than two years after the appearance of that initial disc, the band finally offered its follow-up, Does. This work, the first from Butch Trucks' Flying Frog Records label, presents a coherent, crystalline moment in the history of the group.

In the following conversation bass player Marc Friedman discusses the development of the band, the challenges of putting together a studio release and the nature of live performance. For additional information visit the group's web site, http://www.theslip.com.

DB- Let's start with your recent New England tour. You played at Scullers a traditional sit-down jazz room and then a few days later at Lupo's a classic smoke-filled, ornery club. I think it says quite a bit about the Slip that you are comfortable in both settings. I'm curious to hear your perspective on the disparity of the two venues.

MF- Playing at Scullers has been a personal goal. I've been seeing music there since high school, some of the best, most inspirational music. I've seen Maceo, McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones. John Scofield played at the other place in town [Regattabar]. The most inspirational shows in my life have always been there. I guess the broad range of what we've been studying allows us to understand and love the various idioms that thrive in the different rooms. Our feel for the quieter rooms comes from the classical realm which we've all studied. At certain points that led to the jazz thing. Of course Jazz was very dance-oriented for a long time too when it was pop music in the twenties. Our music is similar in the sense that jazz can be for dancing or sitting down. It's easy to put on a jazz album and either sit down or dance. Either comes pretty naturally to me. Of course you can take any form of music and listen to it that way. I enjoy listening to harder music in a more sedate manner. You listen to how the musicians complement each other or the singer or the lyrics.

DB- Okay, so that's the jazz side. What about Lupo's?

MF- In Lupo's we've played very quietly before and used the bigger sound system to pick up our smaller notes, plus we'll use the big system to create the silence that sounds really good in that setting. But we really don't change it up too abruptly, too distinctly from one situation to another. The one exception might have been when we were opening up for String Cheese and we had under an hour. I remember really talking about those sets and trying to figure out what to play because we could only fit in three or four tunes. It's the smaller stuff that we tend to talk about, like the time, not the environment.

DB- To what extent do you come on stage with set lists?

MF- Generally we don't really talk about the sets too much except for what we're going to play first so we know what to do when we get out there. Plus maybe we'll discuss a couple of tunes we want to play during the night. At times it's something we struggle with. I don't think any of us like those moments when we're trying to decide what tune to play. We just do it because much of the time it flows like butter and we love that feeling. So we never want to set ourselves up so we can't be there in that moment. We basically never write a setlist because we want to have that feeling of knowing what tune to play subconsciously. We'll also pick up the atmosphere in the room. We can tell if people want to dance and we can tell if they want to listen. Sometimes we'll give them the opposite of what they want, just to conjure up a feeling in them that they aren't expecting. I think that's how we win over a number of unsuspecting listeners, we try to grab them. Ultimately of course we just play from the heart with whatever we're doing, whether it's a swing tune or a very mellow arrangement or an improv or some sound. It's a wide spectrum.

DB- Let's talk a little about your own development as a musician. When did you begin playing bass?

MF- I started classical piano when I was seven. That was more of a task. My family made me practice a half hour a day. It was kind of a chore. If you ask my mother she'll say I wasn't compliant at all times. But there was something I liked about it because I stuck with it. Then I really got bit by the rock and roll bug when I was about 11- this was back when all the Guns and Roses type glam rock was in it supremacy. I picked up a guitar but it scared me a bit because I wanted to be good. It was hard for me to take it home from the store and not be able to play anything on it because I could play somewhat on piano. A year later I picked a cheap bass- for four track reasons because my brother and I were really into four-tracking. I would also lay down drum kit because my dad plays drums a little bit. Right around the time I met Brad and Andrew I got the gig in the school jazz band on bass. That's when I began my education on electric bass, which began with the jazz standards. Around that time my education also became solid in the blues idiom. I think that's what really led to the marriage of musicianship and my love for music through B.B. King and Buddy Guy and Otis Rush. I was getting deep into the Chicago blues sound, and in part that's due to my father who's a pretty avid blues fan. The blues led into the jazz stuff, the fusion stuff of the seventies.

DB- Was there any particular bass player you emulated?

MF- I'd have to say none until Jaco. . For me Jaco is the pioneer. He's the Charlie Parker of the electric bass. There were acoustic players who took it pretty far in the 50's and 60's with almost the same style as on the acoustic bass, which is incredible- people like Scott LaFaro who played with Bill Evans. But Jaco took the Fender fretless bass which is what I play and he invented the tone which is very cutting, and provided for very clear diction, which is just beautiful. It's great. It's new. It's fun My bandleader introduced me to his music. This was when I started taking a good look at the bass, and I started really enjoyed playing foundation whether it was with a blues album or an Allman Brothers tape. I liked the way the bass fit underneath. I could always hear it, it didn't get lost in the sea of distortion among all the different pitches. I liked that one pitch I think. Plus my hands are really big so bass just kind of fell right in. Within two years I was mainly a bass player, By the time I went to Berklee I was a bass player.

DB- How long did you spend at Berkeley?

MF- Two semesters.

DB- In that sense you are yet another in that fine tradition of performers who left the school to become working musicians. What led to that decision?

MF- I was antsy. The band was gung-ho, we were writing tunes. We'd had a taste of gigging. We wanted to pursue touring, making an album and writing more tunes. Brad and Andrew ended up staying one more semester than I did. When I was there I was happy to be bombarded by the multitude of students and teachers, the infinite range of music that's out there as well as the different personalities and takes on music. Music is about communication and synching up with the right players and also about having the most open and free mind possible to put it in the right atmosphere where it can exist and be true. At Berklee I felt that I was lost in a sea of anxious bass players. I felt I had been there two semesters and I had a bunch to work on. So basically I just took it to my bedroom and started shedding like crazy while still keeping as many contacts as possible with the Berklee crowd. I wouldn't quite say that I owe everything to Berklee but if I did it again I definitely would not skip that step.

DB- What did you work on during that period?

MF- I was listening to a lot of Jaco but I was also getting my foot in the door with some straight ahead stuff. Basically I knew the concept of bebop, and I realized that I would have to take a bite of that cake if I wanted to accept the trueness of being a jazz player, just to have that under my fingers which I felt was necessary. I admired some of the people who changed jazz in the 60's like Wayne Shorter, Coltrane, Ornette Coleman. I knew that in order to understand someone like Coltrane I had to go to blues and bebop and even Dixieland which is where they were coming from. So in studying music I was chronological. I had a deep interest in Dixieland and early swing stuff and I'm still working on it. Obviously I knew and I still know it was going to take a lot of struggle and time so I've just kept at it. I also realize that I'm not playing a trumpet or a tenor sax, I'm playing an instrument that's new to the jazz world. The electric bass is the youngest instrument in our scene. It had a tremendous impact on pop music. It made pop music cut through the radio waves a little more.

DB- You mentioned that you met Andrew and Brad in high school. That is when you joined the Slip but none of you are original members of the group, right?

MF- Ahh, you know the secret. The Slip started as an institution at the high school before we even attended. It was primarily a cover band. The personnel changed as people graduated. There was one guy named John Myers who was in the original band and he stayed the longest, for about 4 years, which is a long time in high school years. It was a cover band until 93 when Brad and Andrew joined. It was a large band with maybe six people doing classic rock: Steppenwolf, CCR, just the faves. Andrew and Brad have been playing together they whole lives and they've always had original music. I can remember watching on the sideline, thinking they were great when it was Brad, Andrew, John and a friend of theirs from Providence, Adam Mutterpurl. Meanwhile I was playing with Brad, Andrew and John in the jazz band or just jamming. They started writing originals and that's what changed the Slip. Somewhere along the way they invited me to join.

DB- One thing I enjoy about the band is the way you shake things up from night to night. How conscious is that effort?

MF- What's so entertaining for me and obviously Brad and Andrew is there is no fear of monotony in the live setting. Our concepts run so parallel. Right now we're talking about the freedom, improvisational freedom that we all love. The three of us all love playing in the pocket and playing arrangements. We have a lot of fun bending arrangements as well, where you have the arrangement set and you know you can add freedom wherever you want. Then we just look for a cue from any of the three of us and we're back to another segment of the tune. Sonically there's just an endless realm for us to work with. When we get to touring night after night it gets really fun. It's all about making frequencies together. The oscillation of sound. The tones that Andrew creates with his tom toms or I create with an interval on my bass. Brad over the top. Sometimes it happens to fall into a rhythm which is good for the audience but my favorite part is when we're creating totally free.

DB- In terms of cues do you typically use musical cues or visual ones?

MF- I find that a look is almost always enough because everybody knows what's up next. If you've been playing with cats for a long time you don't need a specific hand signal or anything. Maybe if it gets really complicated. But we definitely communicate as much as we can with eye contact. Once in a while a raised eyebrow is enough. Sometimes I'll take Brad's ear while I'm in the middle of a tune and try to explain something that I want to happen that's improvisational, like "Hey, let's hit these chords." Or if Andrew's in the middle of a drum solo I'll tell Brad, "When I make this sign let's just do something crazy in the higher registers of our instruments," and then Andrew can just react to it at the moment. Basically I do that to surprise Andrew. People like Ornette or Sun Ra were always trying these crazy, spontaneous things.

DB- Let's move from the stage to the studio. Describe the challenges you faced in creating Does.

AMF- Basically I see the studio as a huge thing in a musician's life. It's a monumental task. Someone like John Scofield or Aretha Franklin or Duke Ellington they just went into a big cold room and captured an amazing sound and feeling which is quite a task and it's very difficult. So that's what we did, we went into the studio and we tried our hardest. A lot of people were talking live disc but that's off the mark for me. That's not where I'm heading personally or where the band should head. We need to get to that point where we can nail it in the studio because anybody I've ever respected in the musical world has done it. I would feel like I was cheating myself if I didn't, if I could only do it in a live setting. It's a weighty task on my shoulders, on everybody's shoulders and it didn't help that we waited three years because we had a hundred tunes in our repertoire. Gecko came out in 97 and we'd been shy with the studio because we'd been touring and recording live shows. We kind of got lost. When we finally went in there we recorded 150 minutes of music on older analog gear. We went way overboard. We went in with maybe ten tunes we wanted to lay down and we came out with twenty-two.

DB- I would imagine it was a challenge selecting songs, especially because your compositions are so diverse.

MF- Well we have some songs that are closer to pop and some that are closer to jazz but I would say that a lot of our peers are doing the same thing with a bunch of instrumentals and some vocal tunes. We try to convey our deep appreciation and love of both idioms, and communicate that to our listeners who appreciate our more straight-ahead jazz playing which is found on this album along with more recent groove type of groove playing which is prevalent on the scene today. There's a popish tune, and there's some sounds that were out there- a soundscape which opens the album. I think it's a pretty good balance and reflection of what it is we do, one take on the Slip.

DB- Does is the first release on Flying Frog. How does that experience differ from running your own label?

MF- As you can see we're very slow with our decision-making process because we want to keep it going, keep the integrity of the band. We don't want to change anything because we're petty content with what's going on. So we took a long time to decide whether to do this or not. But after meeting with Butch the whole thing just seemed so perfect. It's out of our hand right now which is good because we weren't the best record label for us, for all the reasons I just said. We're so immersed in the music that weren't ever really a record label.

DB- What are your impressions of Flying Frog at this point?

MF- It's been very cool so far. Obviously the relationship is in the early stages. The album just came out so we're getting used to the realness of it all. It's obviously not a big label thinking we're something that we're not. Butch really understands what we're doing and where we're coming from which is very cool for a record label president. When you have the president right with you, not to mention him being someone who had inspired us all, it's very cool. We feel we're very lucky to be in this situation.