Dizgo jams, from Bloomington to Boston and everywhere in between

You cannot paint the band Dizgo into a corner. When you hear one of their songs, you might hear three or four different styles in that song, and then you'll hear something completely different in their very next song. The one commonality… their songs are mostly really, really long.

Dizgo is from Bloomington, Indiana, and bassist and keyboard player Kevin Hinnefeld joined us on WFYI.

KEVIN HINNEFELD:  Thanks for having me.

RAY STEELE: Bloomington, Indiana is where Dizgo calls home? Is that where the band came together? And how did the band come together?

HINNEFELD:  So, myself and Andrew Pickel, our guitar player and singer songwriter in the band, we're both from Bloomington, Indiana. We met when we were in middle school, and we started writing songs together. So this was back in like, early 2000s. I think 2005, 2006.  I started up kind of a jam band when we were in high school, and played when we're at IU, we did a bunch of basement shows and took a break from it for a little while. And in 2016 we started hanging out all the time again and writing songs again. We’re like, hey, let's start a band. Let's do this. Let's give it another go. And we started the band Dizgo. We played our first show at the Bluebird, opening up for some friends of ours - The Main Squeeze at the Bluebird in Bloomington where they are from, and the rest is history. We've been at it ever since.

STEELE: How do you come up with a band's name? That's got to be one of the hardest things, because you don't want to use something that someone has used before. Where did the name Dizgo come from?

HINNEFELD: That's a really good question. We actually had our show our first show booked before we had the band name. So, we were scrambling to come up with a good name for the band. So, we didn't announce it. But we had a long list of ideas, and we wanted to single word something that was fun or implied…you know, obviously we're trying to play dance music. Dizgo just kind of came to me in a dream. I just woke up thinking, thinking about the name because I was thinking about it every day for like a week, we needed a name. I kind of came out of came out of a nap, and it was just in my head. I was like, that's the band name now.

STEELE: When I listen to you, I hear a jam band, your traditional jam band like a Phish.  You guys get funky, like 70s funk.  You can hear a lot of different things in your music.

HINNEFELD: You know, as far as the genre and everything, we are all over the place. I mean we just love all different types of music. I think what's great about the jam band scene is we can just kind of do whatever we want. I don't think anyone expects to hear certain, specific genres from us.

STEELE: There's a lot of musical talent here in Central Indiana, but so many of them are only playing here in their home area. Maybe Indianapolis, maybe they've branched out to other parts of Indiana. How easy or how difficult was it for Dizgo to break out of that, because you guys get to tour all over the country?

HINNEFELD: You know, when we started the band, you know, it's me and Andrew Pickel – we are the founders along with our good friend… and still to this day, our manager Patrick Milescu… we knew we had a vision to you know, be a touring band, you know, and kind of break out of just playing in our hometown, like kind of right off the bat. So,  we took a lot of strategic steps doing everything we can to really push ourselves in new markets to be able to be on the road. Patrick is not a musician in the band, but he's one of our very key members that contributed so much to our success.

Kevin Hinnefeld plays bass and keys for the band Dizgo from Bloomington, Indiana. More Information is available at DizgoBand.com.