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Dave Matthews Band's ballads and boogies excite Dallas crowd

Jam bands live and die by their ability to improvise, which poses a problem for the Dave Matthews Band, a group with a long history of chasing its tail in circles.

Today, 20 years after it came to fame, the group is gradually getting better at pulling its wayward solos back on track. Performing to a near-capacity crowd on picture-perfect Friday night at Gexa Energy Pavilion, Matthews and his team hit more bulls-eyes than skeptics would have expected.

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"Jimi Thing," from their 1994 debut studio album Under the Table And Dreaming, was the perfect snapshot of the band at its most exhilarating and frustrating. Fiddler Boyd Tinsley started the marathon jam with a mundane solo that sounded like a lumberjack cutting down trees in a speed-sawing competition.

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The crowd went nuts - nothing like a little velocity to get folks hollering - but the song finally took off when sax player Jeff Coffin and trumpeter Rashawn Ross locked horns for a series of daring bebop sprints. The band's newest members, Coffin (formerly of Bela Fleck's band) and Ross gave DMB a sense of verve and focus it lacked earlier in its career, and the duo made up for the show's more tedious solos from Tinsley and speed-demon lead guitarist Tim Reynolds.

As usual, some of the best improvising came from the lips of the band's namesake. Although Matthews is a decent guitarist, his best instrument is his voice, as he showed with brilliant scat-singing in the obscure "Minarets." Sipping hot tea from a silver mug between songs, he was flexible throughout the nearly three-hour show, running the gamut from a delicate falsetto to a deep, demonic growl.

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He was also in his usual impish form, joking about his lack of sanity and thanking the band for being its own opening act: Just like last year at Gexa, the group performed with no support act, starting the show with an hour-long semi-acoustic set and returning after an intermission to play a longer, more traditional set.

The format worked perfectly to show off the band's main strength: its musical diversity. Moving from lovely ballads to rip-snorting boogie and from Spanish flourishes to New Orleans grooves to Appalachian springs, the septet covered an amazing range, especially for a band without keyboards. Give a lot of the credit to the ace rhythm section of Carter Beauford (drums) and Stefan Lessard (bass).

The only drawback to the format was that the opening set began so quietly some fans didn't know the show had started, so they stayed planted in the parking lot, consuming beer and other less legal intoxicants.

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Of course, naysayers claim you need to be stoned to stomach a Dave Matthews Band concert. But for most of Friday night, the group performed well enough to appreciate in any frame of mind.

Thor Christensen is a Dallas writer and critic. Email him at thorchris@yahoo.com.