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Friday, April 12, 2002

By Scott Mervis, Weekend Editor, Post-Gazette

It's a popular pastime of rock bands to resist the labels applied to them, but in the case of Esquevez, there's no getting around it. It's a jam band.

	Esquevez (that's Sebastian Albu, left), who supplied the jam-rock at the Graffiti Rock Challenge, releases its debut tomorrow at the Rex.

Among the clues: the debut record, "Something Tan," contains only eight songs but stretches over 50 minutes; Allman Brothers, Grateful Dead and Santana covers turn up in their sets; and, of course, the most obvious clue is that they sound like one.

"Absolutely," says singer-guitarist Sebastian Albu. "At first we were kind of wary of labels. But I don't think it's a big deal. Good music is good music no matter what the label put on it is."

Esquevez formed three years in Albu's Oakland apartment where he and a bunch of college friends started jamming for parties. As the crowds grew, they bumped up to clubs like Zythos and the Pittsburgh Deli Company.

Albu, 23 and a recent Pitt graduate, liked the band dynamic from the beginning.

"It worked pretty well right off the bat. It was strange because nobody listens to the same kind of music at all. Our old drummer was really into house beats and King Crimson. The other guitar player was into more rock 'n' roll stuff. I studied jazz, Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell, Coltrane. That's where I got the improv bug. It was five really different musical backgrounds coming together."

	Esquevez WHERE: Rex Theatre, South Side. WHEN: 9 p.m. tomorrow. TICKETS: $8. 412-381-6811. BAND SITE: www.esquevez.com

What comes out of Esquevez is a bubbling blues-rock-funk groove guaranteed to loosen the limbs of the average Phish fan. Drummer Ben Lindemann (replacing Dan Hildebrand) and bassist Carl Costick lay down the beat for the noodling conversation between Albu and Peter Zabransky's guitars and the Allman-flavored organ swirls of Jim Merenda.

Between their instrumental flights, Albu and Zabransky insert lyrics of the Dead-Phishy variety. Sample: "I'm the mashed potato/you're the gravy in my stew." Or, album-closing mantra of "ride on the breeze and live on the wind."

"We try not to be too goofy," Albu says. "We try to have fun with that. The ultimate goal is to make people feel good. The lyrics do reflect some kind of quirkiness or stuff that will make people smile or get a chuckle."

Going into the studio to record "Something Tan," Esquevez didn't pull a Dead and abandon the live style they know best. They played the songs like they always do.

"We did a lot of it live, without too many overdubs. A lot of the stuff is kind of open-ended. It's not 'OK, let's do four bars of solo here and go back into the verse.' A lot of it was, 'Let's just see what happens.' "

The album comes at a time when the band's profile was lifted by its run all the way to the finals of the Graffiti Rock Challenge at Rosebud. Albu calls it the biggest thing that's happened for the band so far. Its members know the next step is hitting the road and riding on the breeze.

"This kind of music doesn't get the mainstream attention that other music gets," he says, "but there's a huge market for it. We hope to sell as many records as we can, but we realize that most of the success with this kind of stuff comes from touring. That's what we're gonna do."