Species Being
US musical group
Species Being is an improvisational progressive rock band from the San Francisco Bay Area. They are considered one of the forefathers of improv progressive music. The band originally operated from 1997 to 2002, but took a fifteen-year hiatus, before signing with Rhubarb Palace Music.
History
The band was started in 1997 by drummer Frank Grau (Sleepytime Gorilla Museum). The original line up consisted largely of musicians from the local space-rock group Beyond-O-Matic and other local psych-rock and jazz musicians. In 1998 the line up changed considerably, turning into a quartet featuring Mike DiPirro on bass (Free Peoples, Soulstice, Radioactive), Jai Young Kim on keyboards (Secret Chiefs 3), and guitarist Eli Good (Grassy Knoll). After the departure of DiPirro in 1999, Species Being included several new musicians to its rotating line up including bassist Kenseth Thibideau (Pinback), guitarist Mitch Cheney (Rumah Sakit), composer/keyboardist Graham Connah, and bassist Matt Lebofsky (Secret Chiefs 3, MoeTar, miRthkon). This rotation of members stuck with the band until their break up in 2002.
The group reunited as a trio in 2017. The current line up consists of Matt Lebofsky, Jai young Kim and Frank Grau.
The public source identifies “Species Being” as uS musical group. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Species, Being and musical.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 15, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7574956. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1997, 2002, 1998 and 1999.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Species Being” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.