Diego’s Umbrella brings adventure to Bend

Published 12:00 am Thursday, November 29, 2018

Diego’s Umbrella played one of its first shows in Bend at Silver Moon Brewing eight years ago.

The gig sticks in drummer Jake Wood’s mind for a couple of reasons. At the show itself, the self-proclaimed gypsy rock band played for a group of women who “were just hounding our bass player as we were coming to the stage.”

“This bass player, he’s no longer with us, but he kind of had this Ryan Seacrest, good-old-boy charm to him, and they just ate it up,” Wood said from his home in San Francisco before Thanksgiving. Diego’s Umbrella hit the road this week and will return to the Domino Room on Saturday. “It was the first time I felt like a piece of meat onstage, and I’m not necessarily saying that in a negative way. That’s not something that many men get to experience, so that was — for me — that was kind of hilarious.”

The next morning, the band totaled its tour van after hitting black ice as it was leaving town.

“Everybody was hitting black ice. This was 20 minutes outside of Bend — I don’t recall which freeway or whatever,” Wood said. “So we were just watching everybody slide off the road right next to us. You know, it’s one thing if you slide off the road and you’re just a husband and wife on a little vacation and … well, insurance will cover it, whatever. But when you’re a band, you barely have made enough money to even cover the gas and the hotel for the night. Yeah, you have some insurance, but it’s probably not enough to really take care of the issue.”

After raising money through a crowd-funding website, the group was back on the road in a new vehicle.

“I just view it all as a fun adventure,” Wood said. “The black ice thing really scared the s— out of me, but at the end it’s like, well, we got a new van out of it. We got a surprising amount of donations from people, which really highlighted that we’re probably doing the right thing and that people are stoked on us.”

The experience clearly didn’t sour Diego’s Umbrella on Bend. The quintet — Wood, vocalist/guitarist Vaughn Lindstrom, fiddler Jason Kleinborg, bassist Red Cup and lead guitarist Keven Gautschi — has been a regular visitor since that show, most recently making regular stops at Volcanic Theatre Pub. The band seems to have found the right audience in town for its mix of punk-rock attitude, Eastern European folk and Latin grooves.

That mix evolved through extensive touring over the past few decades. Formed by Lindstrom and original lead guitarist Tyson Maulhardt in the early 2000s, Diego’s Umbrella started out with Latin rock and jazz influences already intact. In Europe, the then six-piece learned at the feet of Eastern European folk musicians through after-show jams — the band’s online biography refers to “Croation dance parties” it played early in its history.

Incorporating the different scales and rhythms of European music is a learning process that continues to this day, Wood said. For example, Wood learned to play the spoons, a lifelong goal of his, from the band’s spoon player Mask Ha Gazh, whom Diego’s Umbrella played with in France.

“Initially there was this brief, stilted dialog where (I’m) trying to explain that, hey, I play spoons too, but I’m miserable at them; I want to learn from you,” Wood said. “It was a festival, and later that night in the artist cafeteria area, we sit down and without really speaking much, we ended up having initially what was a tutorial of sorts where he was just showing me his moves, which then spiraled out of control into this jam session where their fiddle player and our fiddle player started jumping in. Half an hour later it was just mayhem, and very little dialog is going on. We’re just transmitting ideas and music without having to say a word.”

Diego’s Umbrella’s lineup has been stable for about three years now with the addition of Gautschi. Last year, the band released its fifth album, “Edjka,” its first full-length studio set since 2012’s “Proper Cowboy” and first to feature Gautschi and Red Cup. The band followed the album with an album of holiday songs from around the world titled “The Christmas Revels,” a surprisingly sedate affair for a band known for its uncontrolled performances.

“Anybody that hears that Diego’s Umbrella releases a Christmas album, you would probably naturally think, oh, so it’s like Santa Claus on ska. I’m imagining now ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ really fast and obnoxious,” Wood said. “And that sounds like hideous garbage to me, and luckily, I think everybody else in the band kind of agrees. … Our lead singer, Vaughn, has wanted to do this for a very long time, possibly for the last decade or so, and he primarily cultivated all the tunes with some input from us.”

Wood said he’s not sure if the band will focus on these songs in Bend.

“I personally just want to rage; I want people just dancing nonstop,” he said. “… Who knows? It wouldn’t surprise me if we DO do a Christmas theme — we may all dress up as elves or something like that. It’s highly possible. It’s unlikely, but it is possible.”