First Jam of the year

Last night was the first Jam of the year at CC Muziek Café. Devin has been holding down the fort while I was in Scotland for Christmas. From now on I expect every Thursday to be filled with the trials, tribulations and joys of hosting a Jam Session.

Devin, Deen and I had a practice the previous day before opening to run through a few things. I’m hoping these Wednesday sessions give us a chance to build a semblance of a house band, but I was a bit disappointed that it was just the three of us running through my Open Mike chords, maybe I tried to do too much on my first week back at work. The mood lifted when Marcel Gorski came in and I ran through a few old classics with him. Sadly he couldn’t be there last night.

Anyway… I was there nice and early to get things set up, and was glad when Fergus came in. I met him through Fraser at a drinking session few months back and remembered that he said he played the bass. It was good to see a new face. My on-going fear of the Jam Sessions is that it’s just me stumbling through songs, and I don’t yet have a core group of people who’s talents I know; I miss Javier, Fraser and Sandra.

Before we even had things set up, we had a band of Devin, Deen, Höskuldur, Fergus and Me. It was enough to run through a few songs and blow off the cob webs. Fergus made a great difference to our Bass-less practicing the previous night. I think we probably did Angie and Dancing in the moonlight. Pretty soon a quiet guy named James joined in with some wonderfully improvised acoustic guitar over the top of everything. We continued like this through another several songs, before I eventually was able to take a break and leave the band to a few jams.

It was sounding pretty good from off the stage. The bar was still pretty quiet but it was good to hear a jam still continuing while I wasn’t playing. Ted and Mathew were there to talk to René about making a promotional video(watch this space).

After a while I returned to the stage and we ran through some more Jammy songs now that I had a feeling for our Ad-Hoc band of the night. If memory serves me correctly we ran through Knockin on Heaven’s door, All along the watch tower and Battle of Evermore with Marco now adding some acoustic guitar. By the time I finished that lot, we also had Dave Harmonica Hulks, Geert and Robert waiting to play. The combination suggested blues was the order of the Jam, and I left them to shuffle away for a good 20 minutes.

Tamira had been chilling in the smoking area down the stairs waiting for the band to go on. I was quite jealous of the coziness down in the smoking area, while I was upstairs being paranoid that everything wasn’t running smoothly. Eventually her Bass player(Lorenzo arrived) and we put together a band to do Tubthumping, Boots and MGMT… before we returned to some blues Jams  until the end of the Jam.

All in all it was a pretty good jam. It started slowly, but eventually there was lots of happy musicians playing away who seemed to be really enjoying themselves. We still don’t have enough audience members braving the tough January weather and Winter Depressie to come out and see us, but hopefully with the number of musicians we have that will slowly come.

Below is a list of some of the songs that cropped up during the night: