Last Night's Jam

[bitflipper]

There is a pub nearby that has open-mic on Wednesdays. I've stopped in several times over the years, usually just to provide moral support for friends who were performing. But many of the participants are honestly pretty awful. Not fun to sit and listen to, and equally un-fun to play along with. A few are delusional, thinking they're the next Joe Bonamassa just waiting to be discovered. Some of them seem to be oblivious to the drummer and take it upon themselves to make up their own tempo and time signatures as they go along. While blasting out this cacophony at the highest possible volume.

I used to try to be charitable. Some of these guys normally perform exclusively in their own basement, and Wednesday nights are their opportunity to take the stage and live out their fantasy. Who the hell am I to deny them that joy? Plus most of them are genuinely nice folks. But to get up there and play along? Yeh, nah. What if the audience thinks its me who has no sense of timing?

Last night I played along. While bravely trying to enforce something akin to a groove amid the onslaught of 1-4-5s in E, I had an epiphany. This is real folk music. How good you are at it is mostly irrelevant. It's all about the joy of making music, and community. Amid all the staged,  formulaic, posturing, lip-synced and choreographed phoniness that is today's music scene, jams are real and in the moment. You get what you get - might be great, might not. But it's real people expressing themselves in a most natural way.

I think I'll be back.

[InstrEd]

20 minutes ago, bitflipper said:

think I'll be back.

Hope that doesn't mean you will be going all Terminator on them Dave ?

[Tim Smith]

[Xoo]

Surely complex time would be

7i
8

?

With apologies for the maths joke.

[DeeringAmps]

12 hours ago, Tim Smith said:

Hey! I resemble that…

t

[Tim Smith]

I have a few tunes I play in 9/8. I can play them if I don't chew gum at the same time.