Bread and Jam

The ‘90s rock world is a Darwinian jungle where today’s toasted hit-maker usually becomes tomorrow’s toast. But the Dave Matthews Band has a proven theory to sustain its hopes: survival of the jammingest.

As the Grateful Dead, Santana and Neil Young have shown, there is a correlation between the ability to extend a song with instrumental flights and the ability to extend a career. People love a band that can play, and the prospects get even better if those jams take off from hooky, hummable tunes.

Not much on looks, image, theatrics or tabloid-pleasing outrageousness and soap-operatics, the Matthews Band, from Charlottesville, Va., has risen mainly on its ability to please by playing.

Atlantic seaboard frat parties of the early ‘90s led to H.O.R.D.E. festival exposure in the mid-’90s and, now, to the sort of scene that took place Wednesday night at Irvine Meadows.

For the second time in less than a year, singer-guitarist Matthews and his four band mates packed the 15,400-capacity amphitheater, and that was routine business compared with the stadiums they recently have sold out on the East Coast.

Meanwhile, a new album, “Before These Crowded Streets,” debuted recently at No. 1 in Billboard and shows signs of keeping pace with two previous studio releases that went quintuple and quadruple platinum.

Anyone watching Matthews closely during his 2 1/2-hour set (in which the average selection clocked in at more than 10 minutes) might conclude that, like some hardy animal species, he and his band are thriving thanks to an instinct for camouflage.

Matthews himself was physically colorless in black pants and gray top; he was an ordinary-seeming guy with receding, close-cropped hair who limited his showmanship to a few outbursts of bandylegged dancing while furiously strumming his guitar. His between-numbers charm-weaving amounted to a few laconic, if sincere-sounding, words of thanks.

Bassist Stefan Lessard wore an orange smock-like top that made him look like a stock clerk at a hardware store; saxophonist Leroi Moore was the cool antithesis of the hot-stepping honker of R&B; tradition. That left violinist Boyd Tinsley to provide a few Doug Kershaw wild-man-with-a-fiddle maneuvers, but his instrument was used to accent, not to command, and he had limited time in the spotlight.

The Matthews Band isn’t stocked with distinctive soloists, the usual engine of jam-band fame. Tinsley and Moore dabbed on riffs and tonal shading, and Matthews was a rhythmic team player, not a prototypical guitar hero a la Jerry Garcia, Carlos Santana or Young.

The instrumental foreground was occupied by Lessard’s active, buoyant bass and by Carter Beauford, an impressive drummer who was flashy but not busy. When the bluegrass-jazz fusion quartet Bela Fleck & the Flecktones reinforced the DMB toward the end, it was no contest: Fleck, on banjo, and his cohorts on saxophone and bass brought technique beyond anything the DMB members could muster.

But the Matthews Band displayed a knack for cohesive undulation that was almost wave-like. Now in its eighth year, the band was tight enough to shift the tone and rhythm of a piece as dramatically yet seamlessly as the sun darting between clouds.

From the opening “Two Step,” the method was tension and release, as surging, dark passages gave way to light-dappled refrains. Many of the musical changes were accented visually on three shiny reflecting screens hung above the stage, or on a backdrop where sudden appearances of galaxies of colored starlight never failed to get a rise from the crowd.

A few times the DMB got stuck--one example was Matthews’ extended, quavering muezzin-call vocal intro to “The Last Stop.” A few seconds would have set the tone for this ominous, somewhat soapbox-ish rant on the dangers of ethnic clashes. Matthews turned it into a gimmick.

Other worthy borrowings included bubbly, loping grooves from South Africa (Matthews’ birthplace) and a visit to mystical Moorish Spain on the flamenco-Arabic “Dancing Nancies,” which owed a lot to the magical “Forever Changes” album released 30 years ago by Love, an incandescent, if unstable, L.A. band from the 1960s.

The DMB didn’t even play two of its signature hits, the funky “What Would You Say” and the pleading love ballad “Crash Into Me.” That’s the prerogative of a band that changes its set list every night. A crowd of neo-Deadheads, collegiate fans and the odd baby boomer didn’t seem to mind that the hits didn’t turn up.

In this jam band, the most distinctive instrument was its singer’s voice. Matthews played it like a horn, tossing out conversationally playful, ironic, husky-voiced lines that suddenly leaped to falsetto punctuation points. Several long songs remained eventful thanks to repeated returns to airy, hook-filled vocal choruses.

Matthews was especially convincing playing an ardent or fragile lover on songs such as “Crush” and “The Stone.” The Dave Matthews Band’s rise owes much to its front man’s ability to deliver lust wrapped in romanticism or to sweetly pour out a yearning heart.

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Opener Taj Mahal played virtually his entire 40-minute set before the announced starting time of 8 p.m., apparently to give the Matthews band a chance to get in its customary long set.

Mahal, a winning presence on the folk, blues and world-music circuits since the mid-’60s, has done memorable work as a solo performer, but he was clearly enjoying himself with a big, funky band that laid down a versatile, romping take on assorted blues forms, from Memphis soul to New Orleans funk and Chicago shuffles.