totally free jamming...afraid to?

thats a very true statement. I've never tried to get a band together and go find a bar or somewhere to get paid to play, because im sure that the band would be to loud and not what the owners would be looking for.

I have played at a few restruants before. When ever i do, i either play jazz, blues, or various covers.

Its obvious people arent buying music to listen to it. If people actually did, then the whole "pop" industry would be out of buisness.

In my opinion, with new music on the radio, they want songs that have a beat that draggs on through the whole song with bad, catchy lyrics for the people to sing and dance along to.

ya i havent looked back on all the posts on this thread, so sorry if i have digressed into a whole new subject.

 

Yeah, this drives me batty... I don't understand why a lot of places even bother booking bands when 90% of the crowd there could really care less if the band was replaced by a jukebox. If I go someplace and hear a band I like, I'll focus on the band. If the band sucks, I leave-- I don't waste my time hanging around because it adds to the atmosphere.

I've pretty much given up on trying to get gigs for 100% free improv; the last couple groups I've gigged with have snuck bits of free improv in (maybe up to 60% free on occasions) along with composed material and plenty of jamming. There seems to be a proportion at work here though-- greater amounts of freely improvised music over the course of a performance yields a greater chance of not being allowed to play at the place again!

 

I like bands that do the opposite. They actually play to play and be listened to... not used for background noise.

 

There's only a few people i know that i can jam with and enjoy it.
I've had too many bad experiences at party's etc.. where there's an extra guitar and i try to connect with someone who thinks they're a god and all i want to do is flow with a melody or they showboat instead of getting something together that sounds good.
I know i really click with someone when we can run over scales and modes in sync with each other. Even basic rythms where we trade off leads over top each other is cool. Add a drummer and bass, wow we have a hit!!. If we do it i know we'll be one hit wonders!! "She fukkin hates me" haahahahaha

 

I can't even find anyone to play with my age that are any good or can really keep up... or they just want to play power chords all the time...

 

Agreed. I would think that most musicians prefer to be listened to and appreciated rather than treated as background noise. Unfortunately it's usually not the band that gets to make that decision, no matter how interesting the music is...

 

so you mean, by refusing to play songs and just have a bunch of you jam for an hour or so... you want to become pink floyd's early days. thats no way a bad thing but one thing that makes music interesting to listen to is structure. while playing, one gets carried away, and anything is fun. but when you're listening, you want to make sense of it, unless you're tripping off acid. you'd get more praise, fans and whatnot from structure. a simple thing to do is one of the things i sometimes do with a band: we write a chorus section, which we play, then improvise, chorus, improvise, chorus, improvise and so on. we have set times to improvise (4, 8, 16 bars.. whatever) then kick back into a chorus. another way to do this, is get an existing song and improvising round it. its about structure and rhythm

 

Not really. Early Pink Floyd was cool, but I wouldn't hold them up as being paragons of free improvisation.
As far as time goes, an improv piece could be 30 seconds or it could be 30 minutes. I would say the duration of a piece depends largely on how focused the group is, and how capable they are on agreeing when a piece has "ended".
I definitely agree that structure can make music more interesting to listen to. I would hazard to say though that even in the most chaotic of free improvisations there is some degree of structure, although it may be a bit haphazard and certainly won't be as cut and dried as verse/bridge/chorus. There is a beginning and an end. There may be ebbs and swells in the degree of sound activity (i.e. moving from dense clusters of notes to drawn-out drones). There may be dramatic shifts in group dynamics. If the performers are communicating well with each other, all these will probably be fairly recognizable. You don't need to be tripping on acid to notice these things or enjoy this stuff, you just need to put aside your preconceived notions of musical "structure" and how we're trained to listen to 98% of the music that's out there.

Very true. I guess it's a good thing for me that I'm not making music to acquire fans or praise! That said, there's still the trouble of finding "free" venues...

 

Me and my buddies used to jam with the most unusual instruments, it made for nothing but good times. A couple guys on guitar, some bongos, a djembe, me on harmonica, a Pepsi bottle filled half-full of water, anything! The best was this one time, we all got super high, and one guy was playing bongos, the other was playing acoustic guitar, and me and another guy were scatting and making up a story at the same time. Crazy!

Later,
Hank

 

well i did so0op that up a lil bit! i was using the idea of acid to back it up. i love jammed music, but i'm just saying acid makes it that bit cooler, makes it easier to understand, which, face it, we sometimes need to understand to enjoy

 

Maybe so. Hallucinogens can certainly make things cooler and can definitely make it easier to dig weird or unusual music, just because more of those mental barriers have been knocked down. In my own experience though, I've never really had a breakthrough of real musical "understanding" while on acid in terms of grasping the theoretical or philosophical underpinnings of a particular style of music. The initial experience of an avant-garde, experimental or otherwise "weird" musical style-- perhaps made a bit more comfortable by a nice chemical high-- was often followed up by careful, sober listening and research on my part. (Anathema for some, I'm sure!)

 

i love playing when im on mushrooms
the sound and the feel of accoustic are so good

 

dude, i think you're absolutely right. i LOVE just jamming for the fuck of it, and let whatever comes come...

i had a band earlier last year. just me, on guitar and vocals, and my friend on drums. after awhile we got a bass player, too. but all we did was just get together, smoke a little, and just fuck around and play shit off the top of our heads. it was the most fun i've ever had in a band, EVER. we'd just play some messed up instrumental shit, and then i'd just start saying things overtop of the songs. like, sometimes speaking, sometimes singing, sometimes screaming. and i wouldn't even pay attention to verse/chorus/bridge/whatever patterns, i'd just say things overtop of the songs. we'd just go for it. it was fucking stellar. i think more bands should try this, instead of slaving themselves over the same old patterns and formulas.

oh, and i'd DEFINETLY pay money to see a band preform that does shit like that for concerts. hell, i'd love to BE in a band that does that kind of shit.

 

well look forward to my new project man... i'm gettin a band together that's on a soulive/mmw tip, something like jazzy and funky, yet more like a jam session.

 

oh dude...jamming right now would be so awesome.

Yesterday me and a few good friends played "breathe" from pink floyd, and i was on the organ for the first time in my life, it was so damn fun! We played like 4 hours straight of different music...maybe only changing for 6 songs.

I still wish we could get, all the musicains on hip forums on line, or at least a few, and have online jamming. That would be fun as hell if that could work!

 

man, that sounds awesome!! i'd love to ehar that, when you've got it all together.

and rhasta.penguin, that sounds like a sweet idea. i've downloaded songs from a band before, these two guys that have never even met each other, and they just sent sound files back and forth and added new things to them and sent them back. it sounded wicked. you couldn't even tell. that would be sweet if we could do shit like that, here.

 

Hard to find people to jam with around here, really...