Family Groove Company's jazzy jams have pop smarts

A jam band's eternal struggle is how to integrate improvisational skills with traditional song craft. Each assemblage of musicians works out its own mix, but common logic dictates that intuition decides when to jam out and when to play it straight.

Chicago-based jam band Family Groove Company certainly has the skills; all members are professionally trained. Yet, as keyboardist, vocalist and primary songwriter Jordan Wilkow points out, the quartet strives for balance between brainy jazz chops and relatable pop anchors, with a steady flow of funk providing rhythmic glue.

The group began with Wilkow and guitarist Adam Lewis, both Highland Park natives, who moved to Los Angeles in 1999. While attending The Musician's Institute in Hollywood, they also intended to put a band together. This happened once they met Pennsylvania-bred bassist Janis Wallin and Swedish-born drummer Mattias Blanck. The quartet played out of L.A. until they finished classes (or teaching) at the college.

"We decided that L.A. wasn't the place for us, for the type of music we wanted to do," says Wilkow. In late 2002, Family Groove Company relocated to the more jam-friendly city of Chicago, which they call home despite playing more than 100 gigs a year around the United States. 2008 included dates at Midwest fests like Summer Camp in Chillicothe, Ill, Minnesota's 10,000 Lakes and Milwaukee's Summerfest.

The band recently released its third studio album, "Models & Metrics," hot on the heels of "Live in Chicago," which was recorded at Martyrs' in November 2007. Its longest track just topping 71/2 minutes, the disc doesn't sprawl out so much as concentrate Family Groove Company's easygoing fusion. The big rock 'n' roll hooks of "Every Time You Shake It," "We Could" and "Another Before I Go" contrast with the low-key pop-funk of "The World Is Watching (Part Two)" and "Falling Off the Fence."

By the time it concludes with "Well in Hand," the aforementioned longest track, their economy has earned them the right to stretch out, and Wilkow and Lewis' extended instrumental interplay brings it to a liberating close. Throughout, the rhythms remain slinky and melodies remain smooth, the product of "a certain sophistication" Wilkow says is a key ingredient of the band's music.

"I studied a lot of jazz," the songwriter says, "which for the most part makes use of harmony that is more sophisticated than your typical pop song. Bringing in those ideas but presenting them in a composition that doesn't alienate the average listener, that has always resonated with me. The bands that I feel accomplished that - The Beatles, Steely Dan - have always meant a lot to me."

Aside from classy melodic phrases, Family Groove Company's other calling card is the congenial groove announced in their name. Wallin and Blanck are an undeniably solid rhythm section, never overshadowing their bandmates but never cowering behind them, either. A track like "The Unlimited Space Around Us" seems straightforward at first listen, but closer attention reveals effortless rhythmic complexities.

As songwriter, Wilkow says one of the band's goals is to provide twists and turns within instantly relatable sounds. Thus, classic jazz-funk, like Herbie Hancock's 1973 fusion masterpiece "Head Hunters," and modern-day crossover artists Medeski Martin & Wood offer the rhythms that most influenced him.

"We all like the more straight-ahead funk like James Brown and George Clinton & P-Funk," Wilkow says. "But what's fun about a guy like Herbie Hancock is at its root, funk is a fairly simple idiom, at least harmonically speaking. It's often one or maybe just two chords, and it's all about the groove they lay down. When jazz artists caught wind of this music, saw how popular it was and wanted to put their own stamp on it, they brought with them a harmonic and melodic vocabulary that funk hadn't dealt with yet."

The songs on "Models & Metrics" are relatively economical, as jam bands typically are in the studio, saving the genre's famously extended instrumental marathons for the live setting. Wilkow says the band considers live and studio performances "separate entities," and that while a few of the new songs will stretch out live, "to really be indulgent in an open, free improvisational section and for it to hold up to the kind of scrutiny a studio record permits is for us a fairly daunting task. The studio is an opportunity for us to spotlight our other strengths."

Even having played so many shows, Family Groove Company still searches for the perfect song-to-jam balance.

"I think when I was younger, I found that I had a lot more confidence in where I was striking that balance, where it naturally seemed right to me," admits Wilkow. "Having been on the road for six years as we have and having watched audience after audience react to our music, I've in some ways had multiple crises of confidence. We'll lose an audience in a place I really didn't think we'd lose them, or they totally respond at a place where I thought it would be more cerebral or over people's heads."

According to Wilkow, he wrote much of "Models & Metrics" at a time when he was anxious about "not really knowing what's going to happen and wanting to get things right. On a path less traveled, the example is not clearly laid out, so the first question becomes 'How do I do it?' Then, as I'm moving along, 'How am I supposed to evaluate how well I'm doing it?' That's the model and the metric, looking for the example to follow, and the unit of measurement you use to evaluate your progress."