[Harp-L] Do blues jams turn off the public

[Michael Easton <diachrome@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bill Hines is right about our local jam.

He is also right about how many actually support the local blues bands  
which are around 8-10 just in the metro Harrisburg area.  The jam may  
attract 200 to 250 people per week but out of that number 40-50  may  
be musicians.  Out of the remainder there may be only 10 to 12 that  
you will see out on the weekend to attemd blues gigs. Harrisburg is  
down to 2 blues clubs. One has blues only bands Friday nights. The  
other a mix of R&B with blues on Saturday night. A few offer a variety  
of different music.

Other bar jams in the area have tried and failed because musicians see  
the local blues society jam as home so they support it.

Now the next question should be do blues jams hurt blues bands  
attendance?

Maybe so in our area. The jam is held every Thursday night. Close  
enough to the weekend without having to wait for the weekend to go  
out. Gigging musicians, including myself attend. When the audience can  
see you Thursday night why venture out Friday or Saturday night to see  
you with your band. So they do something else. You have to invite them  
to your gigs in person in order to get a lot of them to attend beyond  
the initial 10 that do.

 Many local bands have got their start hooking up at the jam but it  
also ends up the only place to get a good audience but you can't play  
it as a working band. It's  100% jam.   Funny thing about our jam,  
it's mostly the newbies that play early.  The "star" players that want  
to be seen hold off until after 9 or 10pm to hit the stage.


On Oct 13, 2011, at 2:43 PM, harp-l-request@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Message: 4
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:16:41 +0200
From: Bill Hines <billhines4@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Harp-L] Do Blues Jams turn the public off?
To: Harp- L <harp-l@xxxxxxxxxx>
Message-ID:
	<CAN62SftVcb9epALfAzwzosgwE5buMH8D9TnyydKsLPdndLsfiA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Hey don't blame the problem on us blues jam hacks! In Harrisburg, PA  
our jam
is a celebration of the blues, a very cooperative situation where the  
big
guns light up the crowd and often act as mentors to the folks who are  
just
coming up (which leads to them being entertaining, crowd pleasing big  
guns
later someday too!). We get a pretty huge crowd at our jam, normally  
host 8+
sets of *pure* jam (no host band). sometimes it's magical, sometimes  
not,but
it's always entertaining. Now if we could get all those people to show  
up at
the regular band bar gigs, but we have a core group that does. I agree  
with
whomever said earlier that a jam doesn't have to suck, it's all on who  
is
running it and how.

Bill Hines

Michael Easton
www.harmonicarepair.com