Tuesday, January 8, 2008
A Couple of Jamdom Notes
Jammuary If your are a subscriber of a cable service that has digital on demand cable service and you love music, I strongly recommend concert.tv's Jammuary set of shows offered this month. They are featuring 13 different programs ranging from potpourri specials of several bands at a festival or jam cruise as well as solid thirty minutes or better sections of live footage of Phish, Phil and Friends, Gov't. Mule, String Cheese Incident and lots of others.
I have listened to a lot of jam music in the last eight years or so. It is a hard thing to explain to an outsider. It isn't necessarily jazz or funk or country rock or bluegrass, but certain artists in those genres are definitely jam oriented. Improvisation is a key, but also so is a certain attitude. The Grateful Dead certainly laid down the kind of ethos that sometimes in spirit, sometimes in form, sometimes in essence, many of these bands follow Sets are often freer and change up regularly. The concert.tv offering is really vast and worth the attention of the viewer/listener wanting to explore. I have discovered some new bands I want to check out further and have returned to some old friends.
And Jam (as in traffic)
Listening to the KMHD Jazz station traffic report on the way to work that comes on right after NPR news. "There is a severe slowing in Vancouver on 78th from Anderson Road to the freeway." What the heck! This is the Vancouver/Hazel Dell neighborhood I grew up in. There used to be a prune dryer near this interchange. My bus stop was near the top of this hill. 78th could be a busy street, but there was never enough folks or subdivisions in that area to create a traffic slowdown to the freeway! It was the kind of moment of personal profundity that makes one realize how long they have been on the planet and how things around them have changed.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:42 PM
Comments:
Thanks for the "Jamdon Notes" post. I almost forgot about on demands music section. Currently I have My Morning Jacket playing. - bc
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