The jam band Twiddle was born in Vermont in 2004 and has been touring aggressively in recent years. The group's slated to play an upcoming concert at Red Rocks on May 2, where the musicians will be joined by regular tour mates and fellow neo jammerati Pigeons Playing Ping Pong.

Westword recently spoke with Twiddle's Mihali Savoulidis while the vocalist and guitarist was on his way to Philadelphia for a solo gig.

Westword: Did Twiddle start in Vermont?

Mihail Savoulidis: Yeah, I went up to Castleton State College from New Jersey. Ryan Dempsey, our keyboard player, is from Burlington, and we both met there. Our drummer and original bassist went to a local high school near the college, but it all started in Castleton for sure.

I think you might know The Samples, who spent their early years in Vermont before moving out to Boulder in the later '80s?

Yes, I definitely know the Samples. My wife's father helped them out with tour managing for a while. I've known Sean [Kelly] for a while. We keep in touch.

Are you mostly an instrumental band?

We have a lot of jams that don't have vocals for sure, but we have a lot of vocals, too. It's probably 70/30 vocals-to-instrumentals now. In a live show, we definitely take our jams out and get loose.

Do you do most of the singing?

Yes, and I primarily write most of the songs.

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Do you do any covers, or is it all original music? We do some covers. Sometimes we'll just come up with a cover that day, but we also have covers that have been in our catalog for a long while. We do "Mad World," the Donnie Darko tune, "Rocky Raccoon" by the Beatles, "I Want You Back" by the Jackson Five. "Funky Town." Those are songs we've been playing for a long time, and we'll sprinkle them in from time to time. We also do "D'yer Mak'er" by Led Zeppelin. The list is super long because there are a lot of covers we've just done once and then we never touched them again. So the band got going in 2004? Yeah, our first official show was in January of 2005, but before that we were rehearsing and writing together. Have you only had one person turn over so far in the band? Yeah, our original bass player Billy left in 2007. He wanted to go to Berklee [College of Music] and do some other stuff. The guy who replaced him, Zdenek [Gubb], is the youngest guy in the band. He had an interesting senior year of high school. He was playing shows with us in New York City and Boston and crashing on the spare bed in my room. Then his alarm would go off, and he would have to go to high school.