Jam
Forget about your plans. When it comes to life and art-making, just jam.
Weekly Three
HEAR: I wanna jam it to “Jamming” by Bob Marley.
READ: Impression of the United States from an Indian graduate student.
VIEW: Watch the trailer for Klunkers: A Film About Mountain Biking. Did you know mountain biking was (basically) created in Marin? I watched this last night and really enjoyed it. You can rent it for .99 cents on Amazon Prime Video. Here’s a 1979 TV segment covering the Marin group of bikers.
No. 50: Jam
Want to hear a masterpiece of music? Queue “Jamming” by Bob Marley.
This song! It gets me every time. The rhythm is smooth as butter. The beat bounces forward like a wagon wheel. The drum. The organ. The wailers wailing. And, of course, Marley’s gritty, authentic, pleading voice.
As the title of the song suggests, they’re jamming, man. What isn’t included in the official track, though, is the jam that lead to the jam. For this work of art to come into the world, the band came together in silence, picked up their instruments, and by feeling and experimentation, found this melody — this jam — this flowing and sublime sound that seems to almost lift both musician and listener a few inches off the ground in vibrational levitation.
To me, that’s a miracle.
Every jam is a miracle for as long as it lasts. Whatever artifact is left over — a song, a story, an essay, a film — is evidence of the miracle.
A miracle happened here.
A recently realization for me? The miracle of the jam doesn’t only apply to music.
But what is jamming?
Improvisation? Collaboration? Iteration? Experimentation?
Of course all of the above, and more.
It’s going off-script. It’s having no plan. It’s an arcane process that topples creative barriers and lets color flow out. It’s holding on for dear life as uninhibited feeling, emotion, and thought take you where they will.
Jamming doesn’t get enough credit. And people don’t make enough use of it.
Evidence of its power lies in the fact that, when you jam, you start one place and end up somewhere else without having a clue how you got there.
This transport can happen in every aspect of life and in every medium of art.
In writing, it’s when the next thought follows perfectly after you put a period on the last. Where did it come from? Nobody can say. But it’s beautiful, and it works, and all you can hope is that it keeps happening, whatever it is. (George Saunders explained it spectacularly in one of his stories when the main character, as she writes a passionate essay, describes the process of writing as feeling “like walking across a creek and rocks kept appearing beneath her feet.”)
In music, it’s playing a few chords, trying different ones, stringing them together, belting out improvised lines of vocals, and ending up with some gorgeous pattern. The speed and creative heights of this process multiply with the amount of musicians collaborating.
For a long time, I viewed jamming as a music-exclusive phenomenon.
Now when I write, I tell myself, "Just jam. Have fun. Feel it out. Enjoy yourself. See where it goes.”
This mindset can be applied to life in general with great results.
At least, most of the time. Some prefer preparation, and that's fine. I could probably use a little more preparation in my life.
My friend Alex has a very non-jam approach to the events in his life. He is big on forethought, trying to play out every possible scenario in his head before D-day comes. His goal is to be a least somewhat ready when one of those scenarios (inevitably?) arrives.
As you might have guessed, I philosophically disagree with this approach.
You can never be prepared. Life will always hit you like a ton of bricks. That’s okay.
Hence, jam.
The more you jam the better you get at it — the more comfortable you become in that ambiguous and fluid state.
But most importantly, when you jam, you surprise yourself. To approach life’s victories, challenges, and everyday activities with a jam-like approach is to stay light and agile, unencumbered by intimidating hypotheticals, and to be creative instead of sticking to the plan.
Is it that we are in control? Or that we think we are in control?
To jam is to neglect both of those questions and just flow. ♦
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