Reed Mathis and Electric Beethoven

Lineup:
Reed Mathis (Billy & the Kids, Tea Leaf Green)
Jay Lane (Primus, Ratdog)
Todd Stoops (RAQ)
Clay Welch

While on tour with various projects over the past few years, bassist extraordinaire Reed Mathis spent his spare time rearranging Beethoven (Symphonies 3 and 6), recording each newly reimagined movement with a long and impressive “who’s-who” list of his musical brethren, including Phish’s Page McConnell and Mike Gordon, Marco Benevento, Joe Russo, the Barr Brothers, Robert Walter and Galactic’s Stanton Moore.

The resulting double album, “Beathoven,” was released September 2016 on Royal Potato Family records.

When imagining what it would be like to tour these Beethoven masterpieces, Mathis rearranged his rearrangements a second time, this time welding Beethoven’s motifs and melodies to modern-era dance beats, with plenty of waypoints for the musicians to jump off into heavy, full-band improvisations. It’s jamtronica with Beethoven — hence, the world’s first CDM (“classical dance music”) band.

While the album’s many special guests will show up at various shows along the way, to tour the album for the next two years, Mathis assembled his very own dream team: Jay Lane (Primus, Ratdog) on drums, Todd Stoops (RAQ / Kung Fu) on keyboards, Cochrane McMillan (Tea Leaf Green) on percussion and laptop, and Clay Welch — a young guitar phenom who literally grew up studying Mathis as a bass player while following Mathis’ then-band, Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, from show to show as a fan.