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By day, 43-year-old Alan Friedman is a successful physician. Gary Hartman, 52, is an associate dean at the University of Houston Law School. But at night, the pair can be found bouncing along to the sounds of a bluegrass band. Friedman and Hartman are co-owners -- and the sole paid employees -- of Tapir Productions, a concert booking and promotion company. Their profits are minuscule, but they're not in it for the money. It's all about the music.

The Internet brought Hartman and Friedman together. The pair met when both were on a tape-trading list for the band Jefferson Airplane. One night in 1996, Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen was playing in a "guitar summit" concert at Rockefeller's along with Kenny Burrell and Stanley Jordan. "Gary posted to the list saying, `I'm in Houston; does anybody want to meet me at the show?' " Friedman recalls. "So I e-mailed him back and said, `Yeah, I'll be there; I'll meet you there.' " "We had gone to school in various places around the country and found ourselves in Houston but never would have found each other were it not for these international Internet lists where we just happened to find people in the same city," Hartman says.

The two immediately hit it off, their friendship fueled by a mutual love of music and a treasure trove of concert tapes. "We started to have these gatherings at whoever's house didn't have a spouse that weekend," Friedman says with a laugh, "which became these taper gatherings. And everyone would bring the coolest stuff they'd gotten in the mail lately." Meetings of concert-tapers would lead to something more.

In May of 1999, the David Nelson Band played at the Last Concert Cafe. For whatever reason, the show was barely promoted, and Hartman ended up corresponding with one of the band members, guitarist Barry Sless, who handles most of the band's bookings. Hartman asked if there was anything he could do to help publicize the show. At that point, a couple of weeks before the concert, there wasn't much he could do. Hartman and Friedman and about three dozen of their friends went to the show and made friends with the band that night.

"Then in the spring of 2000 when they were ready to come back, I got an e-mail from the band asking if we wanted to promote the show," Hartman says. "I think they thought we had promoted the show last time, even though we didn't. So I looked at Alan, and he looked at me, and we said: `Sure, why not? We can do this.' But we needed a company, and `Taper Productions' sounded good."

"We've been archiving tapes for 20, 25 years, so when it came time to name the company, it took us about 30 seconds to say we should be Taper Productions," Friedman adds. "And it only took us about another minute to realize that we needed to make a logo that would have an animal or something, and so we made the pun into Tapir Productions."

A tapir looks like a cross between a pig and an anteater. "It's also a completely fitting little symbol because it's an underappreciated endangered species, largely nocturnal and underpublicized," Hartman says with a chuckle.

With Hartman's legal knowledge, Tapir Productions was quickly created. Then the fledgling company made a decision that on first glance would seem to fit into the biting-off-more-than-you-can-chew category. Hartman and Friedman went looking to book an opening act as well. They found singer-songwriter Peter Rowan, who had written a couple of songs recorded by Nelson's former band, the New Riders of the Purple Sage. Rowan and his Texas Trio were also on the road and agreed to open the show for the Nelson Band. The double bill was a huge hit, from both commercial and artistic standpoints.

"It was a Wednesday, the place was packed; the vibe was incredible," Friedman says with a grin. "People started writing us, saying, `Houston is alive again!' and `I can't believe you guys pulled this off.' We had so much fun, and it was so cool. We had about 350 people in there."

But there was still a steep learning curve with regard to the business side of the venture. "I'd like to tell you that we sat down and developed this business plan, with spreadsheets and a grand strategy and all that, but it was completely seat of one's pants," Hartman admits. "The bands could see that while we were naive, they appreciated our honesty and personal involvement," Friedman says.

But Tapir had something going for it that many promoters didn't. They treated the bands like people. "To a certain degree, while a lot of these guys may be younger than us, they were still people whom we were looking up to," Friedman says. "We still had this image of musicians that we love as being sort of icons."

Sless of the David Nelson Band is one who appreciates the human touch. "You run into all kinds of promoters, and no two of them are alike, and some of the guys that get big think that they're hot shots and stuff," Sless said by phone from his California home. "There are a lot of promoters who don't treat you that well. Gary definitely falls into the promoters who really take good care of the band."

Mike Hamill, an agent for the Yonder Mountain String Band, goes even further. "They are great promoters who really, really care about the music and the fans," Hamill says. "They seem to do this as a real passion -- they have other jobs that provide them a living. If more people were in this business because they were truly interested in producing a memorable experience for artists and their fans, I don't think the music business as a whole would be in the dire straits it finds itself in today."

Tapir Productions has put on about three dozen shows in 2 1/2 years. Hartman and Friedman have booked shows at the Last Concert Cafe, the Continental Club, Satellite Lounge, Garden in the Heights and Fitzgerald's. They've even put on one show at DiverseWorks, an organization for alternative theater and artwork. Next month, Tapir will promote its first show at the University of Houston-Downtown. Coincidentally, it features the artist who first brought the two face to face: Jorma Kaukonen.

The pair discovered that nothing spreads faster in the music world than good news. Friedman learned that many bands call their agents the same night they play to report details such as how many people showed up and how the band was treated. "It's immediate," Friedman says. "We had assumed that the word of mouth was going to spread amongst the fans. We didn't really realize it was going to spread amongst the bands faster than the fans. And bands were really anxious for an opportunity to play Houston."

Just as the Internet brought Friedman and Hartman together, it makes it a snap to find bands and their booking agents. "That's one of the things that's made the Internet so good, because you can pull up tour schedules easily and see these guys are coming through Texas and going to New Orleans -- or the other way around -- and they've got a day off in between," Friedman said.

Making the pitch to get a band to play in Houston gets easier with every successful Tapir production. Business isn't bad, but neither Hartman nor Friedman is quitting his day job. "Most shows, we've either broken even or made money," Friedman says. "We feel like we're reaching that point where hopefully all of them will be moneymakers. On the other hand, we're willing to make real money on some shows to pay off the break-evens, so that we can still keep bringing in the bands we want, because our whole point in starting this was to bring in smaller bands without a reputation that we knew were terrific."

Says Hartman: "If there's a key to having a commercial success, I think it's identifying young new acts that have potential. Yonder is the best example so far. We brought them here the first time and had 180 people; we brought them the second time and had 240; we brought them the third time and had 700. The next step is 1,000-plus.

"On the economic side, you're going to lose that first time and maybe that second time, but you have to have enough trust in your judgment or assessment to decide who is worth losing money on the first time or two." Fortunately for the young company, there have been more hits than misses. But that's brought growing pains as well.

"The problem is, now we've got so many offers for bands to play that we're getting to the point where it is becoming no longer a hobby," Friedman said. "Even if it's just sort of a business hobby, now it's getting to be a real business, and that gets in the way of a lot of other things."

Both realize bigger isn't better, and neither wants Tapir Productions to become so much of a business that they lose the human touch for which they've become known.

"Once we get to that point, that's when the sacrifices -- the artistic and emotional sacrifices -- would begin," Friedman says.

The bands have taught Hartman and Friedman a thing or two as well. "I have so much more admiration for these folks than I did before I got into this," Hartman says. "The ones who succeed at this do it because they work about 22 hours a day, and that's what blows me away. These guys drive for 12 hours a day, unload their gear on the stage, play a 3 1/2-hour show, get back in the car and drive another 500 miles, day in and day out. It's the American work ethic on display."

For Gary Hartman, co-head of local independent promotion company Tapir Productions, the moment of truth came after the jam band String Cheese Incident played the Fabulous Satellite Lounge in 1998. "It was about their fifth show there," he says, "and they still weren't selling the place out. Then they went to Austin and sold out two nights in a row at Liberty Lunch. It was obvious then that we weren't going to see String Cheese in Houston again in our lifetimes. The whole phenomenon of bands playing New Orleans then Austin and skipping the fourth-largest city in the country on their way became painfully obvious to me."

Hartman and his Tapir partner, Alan Friedman, are devoted to improvisational music, be it straight-up jam band material or its many variants. "The whole idea of playing without a net and having the music be different every night is considered a good thing by some of us," says Friedman. Today several genres fall under the improv umbrella, making "jam music" an amorphous concept. It's easy to imagine standard jam acts like Phish or Widespread Panic sharing a bill with the groove jazz of Karl Denson's Tiny Universe on one extreme and the warped bluegrass of the Yonder Mountain String Band on the other.

How, then, can you tell if a band is a jam band? Listen, look and smell. If it's American roots music -- jazz, country, bluegrass, blues or rock-- stretched to the max, and the band allows you to tape the performance, it might be a jam show. If the air around you smells like the '70s -- a melange of patchouli and weed -- and there are vendors selling "tobacco accessories," bead curtains and scented candles, you're probably at a jam show. And if there's a drum circle between sets, you know you're at a jam show.

As of 1998, most of these events were passing the Bayou City by, and Hartman and Friedman weren't happy about it. Neither were they pleased with some of the venues in town, especially the Mucky Duck, which until recently had a monopoly on big-name touring bluegrass acts like Peter Rowan (whom Tapir has now booked twice for other Houston venues). "The Mucky is kind of an archetype of not really caring about the music," says Hartman. "It has a crappy sound system and there are cash registers ringing during the show…It's not the kind of environment I enjoy. He had the really hot bluegrass bands like the Del McCoury Band [coming again April 18] there, and we weren't allowed to dance, let alone tape, let alone have anything that even looks like a good time…"

So Hartman and Friedman decided to do something about it. Much like the similarly fed-up indie rock fans of the Hands Up Houston Show Collective, they started booking their own shows. Their Tapir Productions (the name refers to the fact that they encourage taping as well as to the piglike Amazonian critter) has in the last two years brought the David Nelson Band, the Yonder Mountain String Band, Two High String Band, the Slip, Ancient Harmony, Greyhounds, Peter Rowan, Tim O'Brien, Umphrey's McGee and Hanuman to dancer-friendly venues like Garden in the Heights, the Fabulous Satellite Lounge, DiverseWorks and the Last Concert Cafe.

The Last Concert, which is widely known on the jam scene for its "kindness," has become the unofficial venue of choice for Tapir. The club will play host to two events over the weekend of April 20: a 420 Festival starring the Tony Furtado Band and Smokin' Grass on Saturday, and on Sunday, the Second Annual Space City Spacegrass Festival with Rowan and former New Grass Revival singer John Cowan.

"We book acts that you could see three nights in a row and only get a few repeats," Friedman says. "The spontaneity makes it interesting. We also try to book two bands on the same bill that either know each other or have some reason to cross-pollinate, and we've managed to get a lot of neat collaborations, where people will sit in on each other's set. And then you automatically get something that has never been done before."

Though the straight-up jam band wave seems to have crested, the bluegrass segment of the movement is red-hot. But how did the whiskey-soaked music of Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers end up in such fragrant environs? Despite an association with the word "grass," what does this music invented by God-fearing, stern mountaineers have to offer the Ben & Jerry hordes?

"I think that a lot of the sense of bluegrass is that they like to play without a net," opines Friedman. "It's unique every time they come out. They take requests, they play what they feel like playing every night. That's what appeals to both the jam band crowd and the bluegrass crowd."

A certain hippie idol's flirtation with bluegrass didn't hurt, either. Jerry Garcia's 1975 Old And In The Way collaboration with Rowan, David Grisman and Vassar Clements did for bluegrass what Eric Clapton's 1974 recording of "I Shot the Sheriff" did for reggae: It exposed a world of new ears to the genre. "Old And In The Way was until recently the biggest-selling bluegrass album in history, which absolutely infuriates the bluegrass crowd," says Friedman.

Bluegrass is guarded by zealous purists who believe that the music should be played by only the traditional banjo-fiddle-guitar-mandolin-bass lineup -- and that solos should be short. The success of Old And In The Way, and the subsequent rise of the Newgrass movement and the jazz-inflected, extended solo-playing Bela Fleck are abominations to them.

"A bunch of hippies in their spare time made the biggest album in history," laughs Friedman. "A lot of us deadheads or retired deadheads or whatever you want to call us, we got our first taste of bluegrass through that album and we got hooked, and we started going out to hear a lot of the other stuff, and as we got older, we got enough money to start buying the albums and kind of made the natural transition through Grisman and the New Grass Revival, and we started to get this more jamming kind of bluegrass, and then we worked our way backwards to Monroe and the Stanley Brothers and the Osborne Brothers."

And that's where about four million sets of ears are now, as evidenced by the success of O Brother, Where Art Thou? Nevertheless, Tapir shows have yet to fully tap into the phenomenon. "We have this core of 200 people who do know our brand name, but it seems to have ossified at that number," says Hartman. "It's been very hard to reach a broader audience. It's been easier to get noticed by bands and band management than it has been to get noticed locally."

Given the "laid-back" vibe of the jam band world, one might expect that Hartman and Friedman are slackers: clerks at Smoke-n-Toke by day, jam band promoters by night or some such. Little could be further from the truth. Hartman, a lawyer and a librarian, runs the computer system at the UH Law Library, and Friedman, a rheumatologist, teaches and practices medicine at the UT-Houston Medical School on Fannin.

And since they both have such lucrative day jobs, neither has much interest in opening their own club. "Well, maybe we might like to do that, but I know our wives wouldn't like it," jokes Friedman.

But for those who don't feel well served by Houston's existing club infrastructure, for those who wonder why their favorite bands never come to town, Hartman suggests you quit your bitching and just go get the acts you want to hear. "It's a low entry-barrier business," he says. "If you have the enthusiasm and a little bit of time to devote to the business, it doesn't take very long to get a name out there. Pretty soon the band's pursuing you rather than the other way around."