Jams
Introduction. I started free-jamming with friends in high school, and have been jamming ever since, but in the fall of 2000 I had the unique opportunity to record jams in high fidelity with musicians who were particularly adept at listening to each other: Tom Schroeder, Dave Herr, and Jay Orff. I knew Tom from college, and began hanging out with him a lot after I got back from traveling in 1994. Through Tom I met Dave and Jay, two former bandmates of his. We recorded our jams at the same ADAT studio where I recorded my third solo album, while I was living in Minneapolis for six months. We began each jam with no idea whatsoever of what we were going to play. Each ADAT tape lasted about 102 minutes, so each jam recording was usually that length, although on particularly inspired jams Tom would quickly pop in a second tape and we’d keep recording. These longer jams are given subheadings (a) and (b).
Some of the jams were mixed down to a DAT right afterwards, with all the participants listening while one of us mixed, as a kind of second improvised performance. These were very enjoyable evenings. Some of the jams were mixed the next day, often with a practice run done before mixing down to the DAT tape. On the jams included here, I believe all the mixes are mine. In both my playing and mixing, this was a period of heavy effects use. Tom was also getting into heavy effects on his guitar. In my mixes I would often try to find effects for the drums that would complement our sounds. I think a lot of the experimentation is pretty successful, but it’s a shame only a few of the original ADAT tapes are available for remixing. There exist many more jam recordings. The ones I have chosen to upload here have the best overall flow, and at times even appear to have been composed beforehand, so hopefully they will be accessible and pleasing to non-participants. To comply with this site’s uploading limits, I had to cut up each hour-length jam into 15-to-20-minute segments.