Some bands are born in practice rooms, and some are born in the half light of a good night out. Kendall Street Company belongs to the second category. The group came together in 2013 at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, a handful of musically inclined friends who started out playing late night fraternity parties and local bars and gradually expanded into a nationally touring act. Frontman Louis Smith and the group’s original saxophonist had already been playing together since high school in Virginia Beach, and the rest of the lineup fell into place on campus. Today the band is a fixture on the jam circuit, and it all traces back to that early, loose, social energy.

The Name Says Everything

The name comes from Kendall Street Beach on the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia Beach, a spot where the band’s earliest members spent late nights around beach bonfires. The band has said it stands for good place, good company, and good times, which doubles as a pretty accurate description of what to expect at one of their shows. That easygoing spirit carries through the music, which prizes feel and spontaneity over polish.

A Sound That Refuses to Sit Still

On stage, Kendall Street Company is known for high energy improvisation and a willingness to follow a groove wherever it goes. Their sound moves freely among jam rock and psychedelia, alternative and indie rock, jazz, funk and ska, and folk and bluegrass textures that have earned the label jazz grass. The band has cited the Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa, Santana, Fela Kuti, and Pink Floyd among its influences, and it practices improvisation deliberately, using structured exercises that build the instincts needed to stretch a song on the fly. Some of the jams that emerge on stage have become setlist staples, a process the band jokingly calls human samplers.

Nothing is guaranteed from one night to the next, and that includes the covers. Their sets have been known to reach for anything from the Grateful Dead and Devo to Soulja Boy and Alanis Morissette, which tells you plenty about how little the band worries about genre borders. Moments like that are a big reason fans keep coming back for multiple nights in a row.

The Records and the Road

The band releases its studio work through its own imprint, What Is Yes Records. Its 2016 debut LP, Earth Turns, introduced the group’s wide ranging approach, and the follow up, Space for Days, arrived in 2017. Later projects pushed the cosmic leanings further, including the widely praised RemoteVision and The Year the Earth Stood Still, an ambient pop space opera in the form of a double LP concept project. For a band that built its name on live energy, the willingness to go this big in the studio says a lot about the ambition behind it.

Live, the band keeps a heavy schedule of well over a hundred shows a year and has become a regular at major independent and jam festivals, including LOCKN’, High Sierra, Peach Fest, Hulaween, FloydFest, and Rooster Walk. Along the way they have shared stages and collaborated with scene staples such as Goose, Keller Williams, Umphrey’s McGee, Leftover Salmon, and Pigeons Playing Ping Pong. They earned their way onto the LOCKN’ bill in 2017 by winning the festival’s Rockn’ to Lockn’ competition, and they got the Umphrey’s McGee opening slot on the rotating main stage as part of that run. Their first release show in Washington, D.C. sold out with more than two hundred fans, which the band has described as the moment they looked at each other and realized this could be their job.