“Big Jazz Jam at the Albemarle” part of the Albemarle Concert Series.
Jazz Jamming with a House Band
Jazz is hard to define and Louis Armstrong once said “if you’ve got to ask what
it is you won’t understand the answer”. It is so very varied and people have
split it into lots of sub-genres, such as Trad, Swing, Avant-Garde, Big Band,
Free, Bebop, Latin, Jazz Manouche, Hard Bop, &c. You can experience it in many
ways for example you can listen to recordings of the greats or you visit your
local jazz club. There is a jazz “songbook” of “standards” that we like to play
or listen to and there musicians composing new jazz tunes all the time. The
groups of jazz musicians are not the same as a “cover band” because they take
the tunes and improvise using unwritten rules rather than copy the original.
Robert Wyatt titled his autobiography “different every time” for a reason! To
put it simply – if you know, you know!
Live Jazz is a fantastic one off experience for the musicians and the audience
because it is “different every time”. For me one of the greatest expressions of
this is jamming with a house band at a jazz club. A house band is a small group
of experienced musicians who back guest musicians. Sometimes the house band
itself is unpredictable; some of them could be “depping” (standing in for a
regular musician who is on holiday) and sometimes they have never played
together before, yet alone rehearsed anything. The house band usually consists
of a keyboard player, a bassist and a drummer. At a Players Night or Open Mic
session the band are backing anyone in the audience who fancies trying to play
some jazz. So I might turn up and want to sing Summertime as a samba and someone
else might want to play Giant Steps on a soprano saxophone or trombone. The
house band just gets on with it and tries to make the guest look good. Totally
unpredictable and without any rehearsal.
Aren’t house bands brilliant? For me they are the unsung heroes of Jazz!