Jam

jam

1. To cram or crush together; to get stuck.
2. A fruit preserve/spread.
3. (music) To improvise collectively; an open-ended session of jazz improvisation.

How do we get the 3rd definition out of the others?
I researched the origin of the “jam” of the jam session and found that there are several theories on where it came from. The most believable is that it was used for situations in which the musicians were jammed together in a tight space. It seems less likely, but still somewhat plausible, that it came partly from a contraction of “jamboree”. A rather unlikely suggestion I also saw is that it came from one particular session (or series of sessions) in which an amateur singer was present who often snapped his fingers on beats 1 and 3 instead of the 2 and 4 that feels better in a jazz setting, thus “jamming” the beat and the groove. (I’ll have to write a whole other post about 1 and 3 vs. 2 and 4- I feel that some people really need to calm down about this.) Though this explanation is almost certainly wrong, it could easily apply to a few of today’s jam sessions.
I feel sorry for pianists, bassists and drummers at jam sessions in certain New York venues such as Smalls, Fat Cat, and Smoke. They have to accompany endless strings of endless horn solos, which are frequently competitive and repetitive (if there was another word that ended in “petitive” I would add it here) and can lack nuance and contrast. The choruses, and eventually the solos themselves, blend into each other and become fungible. No progress can be made and the session is jammed.
If you crush fruit the way jazz is crushed in these sessions, the result is a sort of fruit preserve. Compressed jazz produces a kind of jazz preserve in which traditions get jammed in a sort of suspended animation. These traditions come largely out of the bop of the 1940s-‘60s, such as the almost universal “trading 4’s” and certain solo orders. However, there are somewhat inexplicable newer traditions in these jarfuls of compressed jazz, such as soloists’ avoidance of certain notes (often the roots of the chords, fear of which should be called “rhizophobia”) and the idea that, no matter how many soloists, everyone should remember the order in which they soloed on any given tune so they can trade 4’s with the drums in the same order, minus the bass player. Who said bass and drums can’t trade with each other? Who said remembering the solo order when there were 19 soloists playing 11 choruses each was practical?
In the face of all this thick, slathery, stuck, fruity, preserved jazz spread all over the place, I have searched for jam sessions that neither get jammed nor resemble jam. The Tea Lounge comes close, but enough people show up that the house band (which is awesome) doesn’t get to play once the jam part starts, and then there’s no guarantee there won’t be competitive rhizophobes about, though there is a limit to number of players per tune which helps to keep the solo orders memorable for trading. Last night I went to Mona’s for the first time; I’ll definitely come again. This is specifically a session for “trad” jazz (jazz of the 1920s) and I’m sure overt rhizophobes not tolerated there, though I must say there were a few squishier players who had a harder time filtering the bop influence out. Nobody, however, lost sight of the goal of this session, having a lot of fun with trad jazz, and thus it neither jammed nor resembled a jarful of jam.
Finally, if this was improvised it would be the most awesome jam ever. (I was in the audience at this performance- maybe I'm in the video.)

Elijah