The Jam Sessions

THE JAM SESSIONS: This record has no songs. It has no logical structure. It is not radio friendly. Nothing was written down. Nothing was predetermined. Nothing was scripted. Nothing was composed. This record was not produced. It just happened. Our goal for this project was to make our traditional forms of composition obsolete. Well, at least for one project. You know, just to find out what would happen without the securities of knowing what to do. So instead of writing down music, practicing it and perfecting a set of songs through endless repetition, we worked on a sign language. A sign language that would allow us to signal all the changes we desired right there on the spot. We worked on situational awareness, so that verbal communication could stay at a minimum while exploring music together. In a way we were trying to read each other's minds through feeling, rather than knowing, what direction the music was going. And while we worked on this, it became clear to us that we were only scratching the surface of what we were doing. Music truly became endless, in ways we did not expect. While we were working on these techniques, something else became clear to us: the transitoriness of it all. When you work on a song, you'll probably have heard it a thousand times by the time you are happy with the result. The jams (by lack of a better word) we were playing only happened once. No matter how simple the melody, scheme, rhythm, whatever. We just could not repeat the things we played. In realizing this, most musicians started cherishing every jam as if it were truly an event. Something in life that would happen once, and never again. I have not recorded every jam. Some of those jams are lost forever, reduced to nothing but memories, slowly fading away as time passes on. Some of those jams are a bit more persistent than others, some of those I will simply never forget. Well, maybe I won’t remember what they sounded like. But the core, the essence of what we were playing that day will always stay with me, like childhood memories surprising you from time to time. This record is like a photo album to me. Each recording a memory. None of it will ever be played again, their time has passed. But just like looking at family pictures from a time long gone, these jams will forever bring me back to moments in time where music and life merged seamlessly, even if only for a moment. Colin Benders Kyteman