Jam Session Quotes

I’ll show you all one last blow,” Kureel announced as the session drew to a close. “This is the only kick you’ll ever need, really. A kick to bring down the most powerful warriors.” Jeeha blinked in confusion. He turned his head to ask her what she meant. And Kureel raised her knee and jammed the ball of her foot into Jeeha’s groin.

Our minds are like junk yards. What we put into them is mostly rubbish! The conversations, the newspapers, the entertainment, we just pile it all in. There's a jam session going on in there. And the problem is it makes us very tired,

A couple people seem to be reticent about the term ‘study,’ but is there a way to be in the undercommons that isn’t intellectual? Is there a way of being intellectual that isn’t social? When I think about the way we were using the term ‘study,’ I think we were committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities was already there. These activities aren’t ennobled by the fact that we now say, ‘oh, if you did these things in a certain way, you could be said to be have been studying.’ To do these things is to be involved in a kind of common intellectual practice. What’s important is to recognize that that has been the case – because that recognition allows you to access a whole, varied, alternative history of thought.

I’m Nancy Wilson. I’m with a band called Heart. We, uh, we’re from Seattle.” There was no recognition on these guys' faces. I might as well have told them we were the Von Trapps. But they had some pot. “Hey, little lady, want some?” one old guy asked. “Okay, if you insist, just a tiny bit,” I said. I hadn’t had pot for ages, and this was some mellow stuff, like sixties pot. It was exactly the right kind. Suddenly, I was loose and free. I went into the house, and there were a slew of guitars in the center of the room. Our road manager Bill Cracknell told me later that Tony Brown always wanted his parties to turn into jam sessions, but they rarely did. I’ve never seen a guitar I didn’t want to play. I picked one up, and started into Elton John’s “Country Comfort.” My pot-smoking friends joined in, and so did my sister. I started walking with the guitar, and gesturing to everyone to “come on.” Sheryl Crow grabbed a guitar; George Strait, too. Soon enough it was a superstar jam session with Vince Gill, Clint Black, Michelle Branch, Reba McIntire, and many more. I love hootenannies, but this was one of the best.

Angie sometimes wondered if they’d still be married had she stuck with those damn yoga classes. God knows she tried. The crowded, windowless studios made her claustrophobic, and that mandatory loop of Eastern chimes was so annoying. Why the fuck couldn’t they play Pearl Jam? “I’m not cut out for this, Dustin,” she’d said after one blazingly sweaty Bikram session. “Serenity is overrated.” He didn’t get angry; that wasn’t his style. Instead he took up with one of the community’s freshly divorced, self-discovering female yoga fanatics that traveled in packs, ever-alert and lithe as meerkats.

The philosopher John Locke once described the case of a man who had learned to dance by practicing according to a strict ritual, always in the same room, which contained an old trunk. Unfortunately, wrote Locke, “the idea of this remarkable piece of household stuff had so mixed itself with the turns and steps of all his dances, that though in that chamber he could dance excellently well, yet it was only when that trunk was there; he could not perform well in any other place unless that or some other trunk had its due position in the room.” This research says, take the trunk out of the room. Since we cannot predict the context in which we’ll have to perform, we’re better off varying the circumstances in which we prepare. We need to handle life’s pop quizzes, its spontaneous pickup games and jam sessions, and the traditional advice to establish a strict practice routine is no way to do so. On the contrary: Try another room altogether. Another time of day. Take the guitar outside, into the park, into the woods. Change cafés. Switch practice courts. Put on blues instead of classical. Each alteration of the routine further enriches the skills being rehearsed, making them sharper and more accessible for a longer period of time. This kind of experimenting itself reinforces learning, and makes what you know increasingly independent of your surroundings.

The four solo careers unveiled previously hidden internal politics as each man packed and moved out from the cozy Beatle mansion. Lennon seemed closest to Ringo, and then George; neither Harrison nor Lennon ever appeared on a McCartney solo album or vice-versa, whereas Ringo played for all three. Of course, Lennon’s solo “career” had begun as early as 1968 with numbers like “What’s the New Mary Jane” and “Revolution 9” during the White Album sessions, and then his avant-garde projects with Ono. Casual jams reflected these affinities as well: John and Yoko appeared onstage with George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and the Bonnie and Delaney band in London in December of 1969. Harrison was slumming with the band after sitting in for a night and having rather too much fun; he appeared onstage anonymously until it got reported in the music press. Mostly they got away with two weeks of touring, with Clapton and Harrison sharing lead guitars almost before most audiences figured this out.

moral life becomes a jam session in which at any time I may improvise for myself rather than play the notes in the score.

I must admit that for years practically the only time I ever prayed was when I got into a jam. But some months ago my wife and I, having a number of difficult problems, decided we would try it again. We found it a very helpful practice, so now every night before going to bed she and I together read the Bible and have a little session of prayer. I don’t know what there is about it, but I have been sleeping better and things have improved all down the line. In fact, I find it so helpful that even out on the road, as I am now, I still read the Bible and pray. Last night I got into bed and read the 23rd Psalm. I read it out loud and it did me a lot of good.

FLETCHER: The truth is I don’t think people understand what it is I did at Shaffer. I wasn’t there to conduct. Any idiot can move his hands and keep people in tempo. No, it’s about pushing people beyond what’s expected of them. And I believe that is a necessity. Because without it you’re depriving the world of its next Armstrong. Its next Parker. Why did Charlie Parker become Charlie Parker, Andrew? ANDREW: Because Jo Jones threw a cymbal at him. FLETCHER: Exactly. Young kid, pretty good on the sax, goes up to play his solo in a cutting session, fucks up -- and Jones comes this close to slicing his head off for it. He’s laughed off-stage. Cries himself to sleep that night. But the next morning, what does he do? He practices. And practices and practices. With one goal in mind: that he never ever be laughed off-stage again. A year later he goes back to the Reno, and he plays the best motherfucking solo the world had ever heard. Now imagine if Jones had just patted young Charlie on the head and said “Good job.” Charlie would’ve said to himself, “Well, shit, I did do a good job,” and that’d be that. No Bird. Tragedy, right? Except that’s just what people today want. The Shaffer Conservatories of the world, they want sugar. You don’t even say “cutting session” anymore, do you? No, you say “jam session”. What the fuck kind of word is that? Jam session? It’s a cutting session, Andrew, this isn’t fucking Smucker’s. It’s about weeding out the best from the worst so that the worst become better than the best. I mean look around you. $25 drinks, mood lighting, a little shrimp cocktail to go with your Coltrane. And people wonder why jazz is dying. Take it from me, and every Starbucks jazz album only proves my point. There are no two words more harmful in the entire English language than “good job”.

Like Miles Davis, Graham often used to turn his back on his audiences. This was primarily between songs, while he was retuning his guitars. For Graham, in the early 1960s, was privy to a secret alternative tuning system known as DADGAD, which he was reluctant to share with any rival guitarists in the crowd. He began using it around 1962–3, on a trip to the bohemian Beat capital Tangier, where he spent six months and earned his keep by working in a snack booth selling hash cakes to locals. The raw Gnaoua trance music preserved in Morocco’s town squares and remote Rif mountain villages stretched back thousands of years, and Graham was hypnotised by the oud, a large Arabic lute which resembles a bisected pear (the word ‘lute’ itself derives from the Arabic ‘al-ud’) and has been identified in Mesopotamian wall paintings 5,000 years old. The paradigm of Eastern music, defining its difference from the West, is the maqam, which uses a microtonal system that blasts open the Western eight-note octave into fifty-three separate intervals. DADGAD is not one of the tunings commonly used on the eleven-string oud, but Graham found that tuning a Western guitar that way made it easier to slip into jam sessions with Moroccan players. The configuration allows scales and chords to be created without too much complicated fingering; its doubled Ds and As and open strings often lead to more of a harp-like, droning sonority than the conventional EADGBE.

Trucker and I did quite a bit of busking together on our guitars, doing the rounds at various Bristol hot spots. This included the local old people’s home, where I remember innocently singing the lyrics to “American Pie.” The song culminates with the spectacularly inappropriate claim that this would be the day that I’d die. A long, awkward pause followed, as we both realized our predicament. The home wasn’t a long-standing gig after that. We also played together with another friend of ours called Blunty, who went on to become a worldwide singing sensation after he left the army, under his real name of James Blunt. I am not sure Blunty will consider those jamming sessions as very formative for him, but they make for fun memories now all the same. Good on him, though. He always had an amazingly cool singing voice.

As today’s young people seek a more coherent sense of identity, the stress that formerly hit them in college, or even after college, now begins in middle school (or younger). By high school, many middle- and upper-class teenagers juggle digital calendars jammed with extracurricular activities that begin as early as 6:00 a.m., after-school study sessions, college entrance exam tutoring, and sports team practices that leave them trailing home after 10:00 p.m.11 Followed by two to three hours of homework.12 Athletes used to specialize in a single sport in high school; now that starts in elementary school. Previously, musicians and artists could freely dabble in various media and instruments throughout high school; present-day teenagers have to claim their craft in middle school. No longer can a kid flirt with a handful of hobbies, discovering various facets of their personality and passions, before choosing what they love. There’s so little time for thoughtful and measured exploration in high school that young adults end up exploring their skills and passions well into their twenties. A recent study showed that 13- to 17-year-olds are more likely to feel “extreme stress” than adults.13 Even more alarming is that the adults closest to young people are often blind to their heightened stress levels. Approximately 20 percent of teenagers confess that they worry “a great deal” about current and future life events. But only 8 percent of the parents of these same teenagers report that their child is experiencing a great deal of stress.14 Parents often don’t realize the constant heat felt by adolescents, increasing the pressure for them to figure out who they are and what’s important to them. After adolescence, emerging adults race from the proverbial stress-filled pot into the stress-fueled fire.15 Fewer college students are reporting “above-average” health since this question was first asked in 1985.16

There are many reasons why girls should not travel alone, and I won’t list them, because none of them are original reasons. Besides, there are more reasons why girls should. I have the utmost respect for girls who travel alone, because it’s hard work sometimes. But girls, we just want adventures. We want international best friends and hold-your-breath vistas out of crappy hostel windows. We want to discover moving works of art, sometimes in museums and sometimes in side-street graffiti. We want to hear soul-restoring jam sessions at beach bonfires and to watch celestial dawns spill over villages that haven’t changed since the Middle Ages. We want to fall in love with boys with say-that-again accents. We want sore feet from stay-up-all-night dance parties at just-one-more-drink bars. We want to be on our own even as we sketch and photograph the Piazza San Marco covered in pigeons and beautiful Italian lovers intertwined so that we’ll never forget what it feels like to be twenty-three and absolutely purposeless and single, but in love with every city we visit next. We want to be struck dumb by the baritone echoes of church bells in Vatican City and the rich, heaven-bound calls to prayer in Istanbul and to know that no matter what, there just has to be some greater power or holy magic responsible for all this bursting, delirious, overwhelming beauty in the great, wide, sprawling world. I tucked my passport into my bag. Girls, we don’t just want to have fun; we want a whole lot more out of life than that.

As I write this, I’m sitting in a café in Paris overlooking the Luxembourg Garden, just off of Rue Saint-Jacques. Rue Saint-Jacques is likely the oldest road in Paris, and it has a rich literary history. Victor Hugo lived a few blocks from where I’m sitting. Gertrude Stein drank coffee and F. Scott Fitzgerald socialized within a stone’s throw. Hemingway wandered up and down the sidewalks, his books percolating in his mind, wine no doubt percolating in his blood. I came to France to take a break from everything. No social media, no email, no social commitments, no set plans . . . except one project. The month had been set aside to review all of the lessons I’d learned from nearly 200 world-class performers I’d interviewed on The Tim Ferriss Show, which recently passed 100,000,000 downloads. The guests included chess prodigies, movie stars, four-star generals, pro athletes, and hedge fund managers. It was a motley crew. More than a handful of them had since become collaborators in business and creative projects, spanning from investments to indie film. As a result, I’d absorbed a lot of their wisdom outside of our recordings, whether over workouts, wine-infused jam sessions, text message exchanges, dinners, or late-night phone calls. In every case, I’d gotten to know them well beyond the superficial headlines in the media. My life had already improved in every area as a result of the lessons I could remember. But that was the tip of the iceberg. The majority of the gems were still lodged in thousands of pages of transcripts and hand-scribbled notes. More than anything, I longed for the chance to distill everything into a playbook. So, I’d set aside an entire month for review (and, if I’m being honest, pain au chocolat), to put together the ultimate CliffsNotes for myself. It would be the notebook to end all notebooks. Something that could help me in minutes but be read for a lifetime.

The train of thought went like this: I scribbled down the most "sophisticated" foods I could think of. Foie gras. Truffles. Expensive wine. Caviar. Ibérico ham. The one that struck a chord with my Jewish brain was caviar. Caviar served with blinis, little pancakes hailing from eastern Europe. In Russia they served blinis with caviar and sour cream. But even if I could make a hundred and fifteen blinis in the time allowed (since we had to make a few extras for beauty shots and mistakes), I couldn't just serve them with caviar and sour cream. That wasn't transformative enough. Original enough. What else was served with blinis? I tapped my pen thoughtfully against my Chef Supreme notepad. We were getting to the end of our planning session, and the way the others around me were nodding and whispering to themselves was making me nervous. Sadie, they all know exactly what they're doing, and you don't, I thought to myself. And then I nodded, confirming it. Jam. Blinis were served sweet-style with jam. But even if I made my own jam, that wouldn't be enough. I needed a wow factor. What if... what if I made sweet blinis, but disguised them as savory blinis? Ideas ran through my head as we were driven to the grocery store. I wasn't hugely into molecular gastronomy, but even I knew how to take a liquid or an oil and turn it into small gelatinous pearls not unlike fish eggs. I could take jam, thin it out, and turn it into caviar. Then what would be my sour cream? A sweetened mascarpone whip? And then I needed something to keep all the sweetness from becoming overwhelming. I'd have to make the jam nice and tart. And maybe add a savory element. A fried sage leaf? That would be interesting...

Great growth firms are a lot like great jazz bands. While jazz is improvisational and entrepreneurial-like, the discipline underlying it allows even musicians who have never played together before to perform a rocking jam session.

Glyn Johns, by contrast, was flummoxed by the group’s self-indulgent, two-day pot-infused trip. “They were just getting high and jamming,”35 he grumbled. His disapproval was not lost on the band. According to Johns, when the session wound down, the two Dennys took him to one side to take him to task. “They said, ‘We’re not happy with you as a producer. You’re not taking any interest in what we are doing.’ I said, ‘When you do something that’s interesting, I’m there. But if you think because you are playing with Paul McCartney that everything you do is a gem of marvelous music, you’re wrong. It isn’t. It’s shite. Frankly it’s a waste of tape and it’s a waste of my energy.’”36 Recording

If you go to a jam session, you can tell which players are scale players and which ones are not. The scale players sound like they’ve been rehearsing scales to play, not melodies to play. Don’t be a scale player. Be a melody player. Your ear should be informing you what to play, and theory should be there to support you and guide you along the way, not the other way around.

Some of the best musicians I know aren’t musicians.” And with that he turned away, impromptu jam session over.

Maddie," Scott said, his bruised face tight with anger. "I heard your keepers have been looking for me. Well, here I am." I stepped back, trying to slam the door shut in his face, but he jammed his foot in the gap. One heavy shove sent me staggering back a couple of steps, and Scott entered the foyer, closing the door behind him. "Guys!" I shouted, "Guys! Scott's here!" But the only response I got was the thumping sound of their music as Kody pushed them through a thirty-minute power session. Fuck. I

At any moment during a session, my patients could stand up, grab the letter opener off my desk, and jam it through my eye socket. But my risk is relatively low. Even though I see patients in my home, which people tell me is a mistake, I feel safe.

Manson had played guitar for years, and he spent time jamming with other musicians on his ward, developing the musical skills he would come to believe guaranteed him ultimate stardom. His unrealistic dream to become bigger than the Beatles, who were at that time at the height of their American invasion, was fueled by a fellow inmate, Phil Kauffman. Kauffman had some vague experience in the L.A. music scene and promised Manson that he would get him a session with a producer at the music division of Universal Studios. This casual invitation warped in Manson’s mind and he became convinced that there was a man in L.A. who was going to make him a superstar. While serving time at McNeil Prison, Manson also became embroiled with a quasi-religious group that had a major influence on his later role as a cult leader—Scientologists. Again, prison authorities encouraged Manson’s education. As with Dale Carnegie, the pimps, the Nazarene Church, and pop music, Manson took what he wanted from the information offered and used it to form a doctrine of his own. Manson’s main takeaway from Scientology was the belief that we are all immortal beings trapped in human bodies on this planet we call earth. Life on earth is just a sliver of our potential experience and so to die is simply to move on. Manson would later use this skewed Scientology-based moral perspective as justification to convince his followers to kill.

Since we cannot predict the context in which we’ll have to perform, we’re better off varying the circumstances in which we prepare. We need to handle life’s pop quizzes, its spontaneous pickup games and jam sessions, and the traditional advice to establish a strict practice routine is no way to do so. On the contrary: Try another room altogether. Another time of day. Take the guitar outside, into the park, into the woods. Change cafés. Switch practice courts. Put on blues instead of classical. Each alteration of the routine further enriches the skills being rehearsed, making them sharper and more accessible for a longer period of time. This kind of experimenting itself reinforces learning, and makes what you know increasingly independent of your surroundings.