Eight people converge on one stage. Drums, guitars, a trumpet, a keyboard, microphones, a dulcimer and one white dry erase board in hand.

It reads, “Hopeful.”

The musicians surrounding Matt Butler see his scrawled notation and respond so seamlessly you’d think they’d rehearsed for hours before this.

They hadn’t.

Since May I have been shooting concerts for Reverb, the Denver Post’s music blog.

The first show I shot was Everyone Orchestra, an awesome jam band that, in the words of Jason Blevin (Reverb writer extraordinaire and reporter for the Denver Post), is an “amorphous, unscripted adventure founded by Matt Butler, whose frantic scribbling, leaping and waving earns him title of ‘conductor.'”

I had never shot anything quite like this show and was admittedly a little anxious going into it. But once the band started creating music, responding to Mr. Butler’s prompts and feeding off one another, my instincts as a photographer kicked in and much like the artists on stage trusted their conductor, I trusted myself.

Here are a just a few shots that I captured that night. Please visit Reverb for the full gallery and Mr. Blevin’s review.