I'm sitting with The Edition at a coffee table in the Shapiro Campus Center, only one hallway, 37 steps and another few hundred feet or so from the atrium. They performed their final gig there on May 8, ending a two-year tenure as campus' most popular live act, during which they often packed venues like Cholmondley's and the Stein, and played at The Middle East, Skybar and other Boston-area clubs.They're surprisingly relaxed, even as they inject a subtle melancholy into their recollection of the band's genesis, evolution and recent dissolution.

"The four of us will probably never play again together," says Tom Pernikoff '05, the campus jam band's guitarist. "I could see different combinations, but never all four together."

Pernikoff is sitting between keyboardist and vocalist Phil Selesnick '05 and drummer Dan Germain, a junior at the Berklee College of Music. Bassist Mike Park '05 is absent.

They're hesitant to discuss their last performance. Originally scheduled to be held on the Great Lawn, the concert, sponsored by WBRS and Student Events, was moved inside due to rain. Their set was twice interrupted by fire alarms.

"I wanted it to last longer, and I wanted it to be in a more intimate venue," Selesnick says.

It took the band, which assumed its final form in June 2003, a year and a half to develop a sound they would later hone as The Edition, which Pernikoff describes as "jazz-influenced rock with improvised and tightly-orchestrated sections."

Pernikoff and Selesnick first played together as first-years in fall 2001, after responding to an advertisement placed by drummer Ari Teman '04, and the three formed the band Pocket. They soon invited Park, who played in the Brandeis Jazz Ensemble, to join. After only two gigs, Pernikoff, Selesnick and Park decided to part ways with their drummer. Teman wanted to keep the name "Pocket," Pernikoff explains to me with a chuckle, so the three quit.

They recruited Mark Record, an acquaintance of Selesnick's, as their new drummer, and formed The Red Shifts in the spring 2002 semester.

They say their musicianship improved during this period, but they had not yet developed a signature style and felt pressured to expand their sound beyond the jam band genre.

"We noticed that as a four-piece-guitar, bass, drums, keyboards-we started in a hole," Selesnick says. "We needed to make ourselves not [be] Phish."

They asked Record to leave the band in June 2003. The Red Shifts' increasingly jazz-influenced style began to require a more-controlled rhythmic backbone than Record's hard-rock style and weak technical background provided.

They found that control with Germain, who auditioned after responding to an advertisement Pernikoff placed on Berkleemusic.com.

Of their music prior to Germain's audition, Pernikoff told me, "there was potential and there were good compositional ideas, but on the whole the sound was pretty mediocre."

Germain joined the band, and the four musicians rented a house in Waltham to spend the summer rehearsing and recording a demo. Around that time, they changed their name to "The Edition."

In the proceeding months the newly-renamed band developed a more cohesive sound. The band had always sought to infuse an improvisation-heavy jam band style with a more-compositional approach, but it wasn't until that summer "when we actually got good," according to Pernikoff.

"I think Dan's been a large part of that, just getting on us about making the songs more songy and less jammy, and kind of weaning out jam sections," Selesnick says.

That sound-a dynamic yet meticulous blend of jazz licks, crescendoing song structures, improvised solos and smooth, danceable rhythms-characterized The Edition's performances for the next two years.

Having reconciled their disparate influences-Pernifkoff and Germain had rock backgrounds, while Selesnick listened to jazz and Park derived his style from soul and funk-The Edition finally solidified an aesthetic that had been formulating for over a year.

"The jams were always there, but [now] the ideas were coming out, and the sound of the ideas was changing," Germain says.

I ask the three musicians if they ever entered a recording studio.

"It was a constant battle for us," Selesnick replies, explaining why they never did. "Some of us really wanted to, some of us said, 'no, I don't want to spend the money or spend the time.'"

"Phil and I say that we were as close to professional as you can get. Not in our skill level, but the amount of commitment you put into it," Pernikoff says. "If we put any more time into it, then we'd have to consider it a professional thing."

The demo from their first summer with Germain was only about 70 percent completed.

As their rehearsals became more relaxed and intuitive, their live show improved as well. Cholmondley's eventually became their favorite venue on campus.

"The Chum's shows always had the best energy," Pernikoff says. "It was dark, and everybody felt uninhibited."

The months leading up to their final show were bittersweet, they told me.

"The last semester was tough," Germain admits. "It was inevitable that the band was going to go, and everybody was going to go their separate ways."

Some band members "were not feeling the last show," Selesnick says. "It was pretty clear who was doing music afterwards and who wasn't, and that kind of had a big effect."

As it turns out, all four members have decided to pursue careers in music. Selesnick currently plays with Boston rock group Glitch, who plans to tour the United States in coming months. Pernikoff will attend the New England Conservatory of Music in the fall, and has been playing in a jazz trio with Germain and Prof. Robert Nieske (MUS). They hope to expand to a quartet. Park hopes to pursue a career in music production.

"Everybody was kind of just changing, and realizing that it was coming to an end and people had to start doing their own thing," Germain says.