Like I (might) have said before, you can only jam as well as you know how your fellow musicians.
“So,” you might say, “how to jazz musicians do it? It seems like they can jam whenever they want to.”
To this, I’m going to equate band-mate-ship to romantic relationships since that is the closest universal equivalent I’ve got on hand.
Jazz sessionists, you might notice, are usually hired guns. In the same way, you can hire a lover for a night. And the more you pay this person, and the better the reputation, the better the results. You can pay cheap for a mediocre lover, but it’s the reassurance you get from dropping big money that your night will be a resounding success. After all, they’re pros.
This isn’t to say jazz musicians can’t be of the other variety: the kind of relationship in which you put in time and effort instead of money. The parties must be in mutual agreement, and the only way for it to work is to communicate.
And, yes, just like real life relationships, the band that jams can have false starts. You can hear some notes slip that weren’t meant to happen. But you don’t stop dead in your tracks if this happens. If you trip, you get back up and keep moving.
Because just like the relationship isn’t about the little disagreements, improvising with a band isn’t about sour notes. It’s about the big picture.
And then, when you can feel it in your gut that there’s something beautiful between you, you’ve found your match.
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- Completely improvised, so really there aren’t any liner notes to speak of.
- At the end, you can hear our drummer say, “I had to stop because I’m sweaty.”
