Jamming with JO

What about jamming again?

Jamming is a way of playing music with minimal or no predetermined rules – just the way children approach most games – with a playground, a few roles and ad-hoc, if any, invented rules. Although the participant’s roles are somewhat defined beforehand (drummer, guitarist, flutist, police, robber etc.) there is certainly no outside direction and with no known end other than purpose of pleasure.

One wonders at which age children first begin desiring more rules, or whether some children desire rules more than others. But this thought shall be left untouched for now.

One particularly curious thing about jamming are its sonic results! When listening back, most jams have a somewhat organic development, one that might be hard to reach in musical composition, maybe because the presence of another makes all the difference. A person’s musical expertise is often brought out in particularly organic way. As a musician, one is sometimes biased by the intellectual process involved in building musical structures, an current of intellectual activity that manifests as sheer wonder to the listener on the surface. This surprise effect works on oneself as well, so when ones listes back to one’s spontaneous jams, there is almost always a big surprise!

Tonight, I jammed with an old, very good friend; after having known the guy for 33 years, I played my first ever jam with him. Although being marginally aware of his drumming I had no idea we could actually click!

While the result will certainly not revolutionise music I have to admit that there is certainly lots of surprising material in it. Here are two excerpts.