In a full-circle celebration and what should be a rowdy good time, Rob Compa of Dopapod fame will take the stage at Nectar’s this weekend with the Niche, a jam band from his hometown of Rochester, N.Y. Compa, who now lives in Burlington, will play alongside members who mentored him as a young guitarist.
The show on Saturday, April 26, is one of four stops on a spring tour reviving a brotherhood that began more than 20 years ago. That tour is a second chance for the Niche, a group that was on its way to sustainable jam-scene success before a hiatus that dates back to 2006.
The pandemic delayed the Niche’s anticipated 20th-anniversary celebration and coinciding release of their second album, but now they’re back in earnest, with Compa as their guest lead guitarist.
Word of the collaboration came in December, just as Dopapod fans were reeling from the news that the prolific improv rock band from Boston would end its 16-year run on New Year’s Eve. Though Compa’s stint with his old Rochester pals won’t be permanent, this special run of shows has generated big expectations.
“I don’t want to even begin to think that I would be a reason more people find out about the Niche,” Compa, 38, recently told Seven Days. “I would like the reason to be that the music is just that good, because the songs are amazing.”
Formed in Watertown, N.Y., in 1999, the Niche brought together a group of musicians who shared a love for Phish and had spent considerable time on the road following the legendary Vermont act.
Soon after, keyboardist Willy O’Riley, guitarist Erik Ward and bassist Todd Nestor relocated to Rochester, where they met drummer Jay Schreiber and formed a quartet. There they eventually bonded with a young Compa, who became a devoted fan around 2004.
At their height, the Niche were filling clubs throughout the Northeast, packing sets with intense, compositionally ambitious jams and entertaining audiences with sarcasm and goofball antics. The group opened for the likes of Umphrey’s McGee, the Derek Trucks Band, Max Creek and Gene Ween, one of the bandmates’ idols.
Compa wasn’t even of legal age when he first caught on to the Niche, he recalled. The teen snuck through the back door of a local venue, where he was astonished by the band’s mind-bending improvisation, equally heavy on piano and guitar. It made a lasting impression on the aspiring musician.
So did the boozed-up tomfoolery of die-hard Niche fans, who went out of their way to party like it was their last chance at any given performance.
“I was just a 17-year-old kid who didn’t know what he was doing,” Compa said. Sitting in with the band at Rochester’s Water Street Music Hall was “a learning experience,” and the advice he received from Ward and Nestor helped develop his confidence as a musician.
The band members “would kind of take me under their wing and show me how to do things — not even necessarily how to play, but how to act at gigs,” Compa said. “Kind of how not to act sometimes, too, because they were pretty fucking crazy back in the day.”
The band’s mentorship confirmed Compa as a lifelong fan. He considers Ward, the guitarist for whom he’s now filling in, a “big influence,” praising his individuality, his fearlessness with his instrument and his self-taught skills.
“He just didn’t care what anybody else thought,” Compa said. He has played the same guitar as Ward, a Paul Reed Smith Hollowbody II, for much of his career.
In fact, in 2006 Compa was close to replacing Ward on a full-time basis before he decided to head off to Boston’s Berklee College of Music, where he ultimately became part of Dopapod. As his career took off, he didn’t forget about the Niche. Touring with Dopapod, he met numerous sound techs who brought up the band in conversation, and he impressed them with personal stories and the collection of Niche bootlegs he keeps handy on his smartphone.
He also maintained ties with the band members. In 2015, Niche keyboardist O’Riley joined Compa’s supergroup, Borg Party, along with members of Turkuaz, Aqueous and Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad.
Now, Compa has the chance to show his gratitude to his mentors with his own remarkable skills. Busy managing a restaurant and venue, Ward chose to sit out the Niche’s relaunch. Choosing Compa to fill his shoes was easy, according to drummer Schreiber. Given their backstory, you might even say it was foretold.
“We have a pretty good history with Rob, and we’ve all been friends with him ever since,” Schreiber said. “You think of all the life he’s lived musically … years of Dopapod; he’s played with [John] Medeski and DJ Logic and Mike Gordon, and all these amazing things have happened to him. All of that’s going to inform what we’re about to do, and I’m just so excited about it.”
Fans are amped up, too. “As I’ve been casually mentioning it,” Compa said, “all these people are coming out of the woodwork who know the Niche and used to see them and are excited about it.”
While the Niche are thrilled to return with such a prominent fill-in, Compa hopes audiences will appreciate O’Riley’s songwriting, which ranges from staggering rock epics to absurd satires.
“The songs are so good,” Compa said. “I’ve never met anybody else who writes music as naturally and brilliantly as Willy does.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Finding the Niche | Former Dopapod guitarist Rob Compa joins his jam idols, the Niche”
This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2025.
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