First jam session – question and case study

A couple of items related to jam sessions were asked on Reddit (r/jazzdrums) recently, I can comment more freely here than would be appropriate in that forum, and why should I give my stuff away to “Reddit” for free.

The question: What styles do I need to know to sit in at a jazz jam?

There’s a little more to it than just styles, or rather, the styles needed intersect with some other things:

Approach

Know the session, go to it regularly, know who plays on it, who leads it. Know what they look like, know their names. Perhaps hold off on talking to them until you’re ready to sit in. I don’t think you want to have to decline to sit in when they invite you, which they probably will when you talk to them.

Know how the thing goes down. Probably the players leading the session will play a set, then start calling people, either in order of arrival, or in order of the leader’s preference. You may get stuck at the very end of the night at first.

Take it easy. You’re not going to show them something they’ve never heard, or in any way blow them away with whatever thing you think you’re good at. You’re looking to serve the situation, and find whatever little place for yourself in it you can find. Your actual comfort zone may be a little scarce. As a newcomer to a situation, you shouldn’t be looking to go in and wail. Be selective, pick your spots.

Depending on the session, you’ll probably be placed with the other unknown quantities, or less experienced players, and it may be difficult to sound real good. That’s normal. You just listen and play your best, play the tune— in the words of Tom Grant, “try to sound like you’ve heard a jazz record.”

Styles

Medium swing – brushes/sticks
Ballad
Bossa/samba
Jazz waltz – brushes/sticks
Latin/calypso – a la St. Thomas
Shuffle – a la various Jazz Messengers tunes

Tempos will not be difficult— maybe 105-180 for swing, 120-180 for bossa/samba.

With all of these you’ll want to be in control of your dynamics, mostly in the downward direction— be able to play them softer than you normally do at home. You may need to be able to do some brush form of them.

If any odd styles come up, you can do what we all did and figure them out on the spot— rhumba, Afro 6, New Orleans type of street beat, something else? Use your ears and make some rhythm.

Tunes

Go to the session regularly and see what they call, and the way they play it. It’s not going to be anything hard, it will likely be things included on lists of “first 50 jazz tunes/standards to learn.”

In addition to any number of 12 bar Blues or Rhythm changes / AABA tunes, it will be things like:

Autumn Leaves	Take The A Train	Solar
Billie’s Bounce	Just Friends	All Of Me
St. Thomas	Blue Bossa	Song For My Father
Meditation	So What	Doxy
Well, You Needn’t	Jordu	Body & Soul
On Green Dolphin St.	Recordame	Dolphin Dance
Blue Monk	Fly Me To The Moon	There Is No Greater Love

And increasingly I’ve noticed young musicians calling some very square stuff even worse than these, that I burned out on years ago on this site’s titular boat gig. Like musicians were fed up with having to play Melancholy Baby 75 years ago, and now people are calling it like it’s the pinnacle of seriousness. None of those tunes will be difficult, you don’t need to know anything about them going in.

It’s always conceivable that the people running the session are Scary Jazz People who will try to hurt you for wanting to play with them, and call something way too fast or way too hard… I don’t think it’s going to happen. I don’t think it’s helpful to live in fear of that. Instead, watch how they play with the more advanced players, and start preparing to do that— the harder tunes they call, and the tempos they call.

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Case study – a paranoid approach

Here is an account of a player attending a jam session in Japan, and doing a lot of things wrong:

When I walked in, there were only about five tables. A piano solo was in full swing. After the solo ended, everyone applauded, so I clapped along. I kept clapping on the 2 and 4 during the following play, but the manager gestured for me to stop. I immediately thought, “Ah, so it’s that kind of vibe.”

What kind of vibe? There is no vibe. Don’t walk into a situation where you are a guest and try to control the room. Be sensitive.

Watching the vocalist sing a jazz ballad, I realized, “I really came to the wrong place.”

There will be vocalists, there will be jazz ballads performed at the jazz jam. Jazz ballads being performed is one indication you are in the right place, if the place you were looking for was a jazz jam.

There was a tiny bass drum (looked like 16 inches), concrete walls, and a low ceiling. I ended up playing two songs. From the very first song, I knew I was screwed. Aside from the Japanese folks, there were two Westerners: a guy in the audience who spoke fluent Japanese, and the host playing the piano.

This is very strange, to be shocked at that precise moment at the presence of Japanese people in Japan, and to decide that is the basis for your being screwed.

As far as you’re concerned, all audiences are Japanese. Or if you’re a Japanese person, as far as you’re concerned, all audiences are American, Canadian, whatever is foreign to you.

All audiences = a lot of strangers who don’t know your playing and don’t care about you, but are going to listen to you. Don’t assume they’re friendly or unfriendly based on their skin color or nationality.

From my angle, they were the only two people whose faces I could see. The Westerner in the audience would frown occasionally, and I could tell the piano player wasn’t happy about something either.

My mind was racing: “I’m playing at 20% of my usual volume, is this still too loud? Is my timekeeping off? Do I lack a swing feel?” I just kept lowering my volume and focused purely on timekeeping and listening to the other instruments’ comping. For the second song, I played as quietly as humanly possible while still maintaining a swing feel. I don’t think I’ve ever played that softly in my life.

There is no “usual” volume, playing volume is always dependent on the situation. To the extent that you have a volume you like playing at, do not use it as a standard of reasonableness against which other volume levels are judged. Your usual volume could be way too damn loud, in which case 20% of it may still be way too loud for a situation.

You should be listening and focusing on your timekeeping from the beginning, that’s not a fallback position when you fail playing all your cool stuff.

We’re only going by his very emotional account of the situation, he’s panicking over a facial expression, and somone else’s “clear unhappiness.” He may well have flipped out and way over-compensated, and played way too soft. Or maybe he’s just never played softly before, and playing sort-of soft feels like a ludicrous impossibility to him.

After those two songs, I just sat there awkwardly by myself. Anyone could tell the situation: I was a total outsider and not welcome (and to be fair, I am an outsider). Plus, I felt like I completely ruined the performance. I wouldn’t have even been mad if they had cursed me out.

This is all in his head. He was actually doing what anyone would do after playing: sitting down and listening to the rest of the evening’s music. Since he came alone, he is sitting alone. But in his mind he is the unwelcome outsider who ruined the night, isolated and scorned, a target of loathing and potentially, violence.

Eventually, the saxophonist came over and talked to me while I was just looking around. We chatted for a few minutes, but he intentionally avoided talking about the performance or giving feedback, just smiling and saying, “You played well.” It felt very much like typical East Asian politeness.

I asked them, “Was I too loud? If you don’t mind, could I get some honest feedback?” The bass player was the only one who gave me a straight answer. He said, “The back wall here is concrete and the ceiling is low, so the sound reflects a lot.” So yeah, I guess I was too loud. He also mentioned it’s better not to play too many triplets. I didn’t catch everything perfectly, but I think he meant I was over-comping.

No one owes you a straight answer about your playing. It’s part of his insensitivity to the situation for him to be demanding it. He knows what happened, why does he insist on them saying it?

A better way to talk to the musicians after this type of mishap is to say, Gee, I hope that was OK, this was a real difficult room for me, it was hard for me to adjust. But thanks for letting me sit in, I’ll be working on being able to handle better for next time.

“Or, sorry about that, I felt like a lot of what I was doing wasn’t really working.”

Then they say something nice, and you go home and work on your stuff, and look forward to impressing them with how much you’ve improved by the next time.

Honestly, I was pretty embarrassed, and it made me realize I need to practice playing at even lower dynamic ranges. But it was also bizarre because the vibe was so strict that if I had played a single rimshot or thrown in some chops, I felt like they would have thrown a cup at my head. Jazz has so many different styles, right? There are powerful drummers like Buddy Rich, Art Blakey, and Brian Blade. But it felt like that kind of energetic playing was absolutely forbidden there. It also felt very closed-off to outsiders.

We’re playing the victim here, blaming the people and their imagined “strict vibe”, complete with threat of violence, for our own screwed up feelings about the situation.

Buddy Rich, Art Blakey and Brian Blade could/can all play dynamics, and play correctly for different situations. They’re powerful drummers when it’s appropriate. They were also likely leaders or featured performers in the situations you’re thinking of, not guests on somebody else’s gig. A room requiring softer playing than Art Blakey on a bad day is not a refutation of Art Blakey, Buddy Rich, and musical energy itself, it’s what it is: a place where you need to play quieter.

It’s important to identify this stuff, but it wouldn’t be productive to say it directly to the person, hence this post. Here is the response I gave them on Reddit:

Can’t say what you were doing wrong, I don’t know your playing and I wasn’t there. It sounds like you don’t have a lot of playing experience, and were playing too loud and were trying to do some stuff that didn’t fit.

Buddy Rich, Art Blakey, and Brian Blade all play/ed the situation they were in, they just didn’t do the one thing you heard on some of their records.

Stuff happens, you have corrections like that, you just deal with it and figure out how you would do better in that situation next time. It’s going to come up again, and it’s not their fault for being unaccepting of outsiders or whatever.

I would guess your job is to a) get more playing experience, b) learn to play a lot softer– like I can play as softly with sticks as I can with brushes, c) listen to the other players more than you listen to yourself, or than you think about what you’re going to play.

Conclusion

This player approached the session in a very self-conscious, self-involved way, and dealt with those feelings by making himself conspicuous, and making the situation about himself in a paranoid kind of way. Lately people have been calling this main character syndrome.

I’ve seen my fellow Americans do this before when traveling. Don’t do it. To whatever extent you have those feelings you identify them as feelings, and put them aside, and remember how normal people interact with each other, and behave thusly. Those feelings are your own, nobody put them there.

Apart from that, a lot of this is an extreme form of some very ordinary feelings about jam session situations. Sometimes you’ll feel the situation isn’t as friendly to you as it could be. It can be difficult to feel like you’re playing well, which can be frustrating. You might project that onto the other players’ attitude towards you. One or two of them may even hold those attitudes towards you.

You just have to keep it together and deal with things with face value normality. It’s difficult. I’m actually an insecure idiot myself much of the time. You just have to understand reality, and act accordingly, putting your feelings in an appropriate little box of lies.

The player in this study needs a lot more experience playing this music, and expose himself to many more situations like this, through continuing exposure he can understand how wrong he was about this situation, and learn to take a non-self centered, non-paranoid approach to it, and towards other people. We established some years ago, to the consternation of some, that there’s no one out there trying to destroy you. Too many of you are into that piece of crap movie Whiplash, and are internalizing its tone of nausea and loathing. We’re all doing this for the love of playing, for the love of music.

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