"In many ways, the Lexington Center on West Vine Street reflects the diversity of events in downtown Lexington more than any other local venue. Conventions, UK games, truck pulls, gun shows, town & gown affairs - now the Lexington Center can add "open jam sessions" to its repertoire of happenings. On January 6, the first LexJam session transpired, with scores of musicians, music lovers, and passersby convening in the Lexington Convention Center for what resulted in a mèlange of jazz, funk, Bluegrass, soul, country, and plain old rock-and-roll. What made this music event different from others that have occurred at the Lexington Center is that every note was improvised, and many of the musicians had never before met, let alone played with each other.
On an equally interesting side note, the players were not professional musicians. They were surgeons, welders, shoe salesmen, stained glass artists, technical specialists, and high school students, to name a few. With the overwhelming support of several local businesses, Lexington's "talented amateurs" now have the opportunity to meet once a month in the first level of the Lexington Center and create music for a few hours with state-of-the-art-equipment (and state-of-the-art fellow musicians). The idea for LexJam was born from a conversation held between Business Lexington Editor-in-Chief Tom Martin and Mike Thompson, a Business Lexington columnist and longtime Lexington musician, at a local coffee shop in December. The event has since grown into a corporate and grassroots-sponsored monthly event, with the next jam scheduled for February 3.
While Lexington harbors a great deal of music venues, talented musicians and open-mike opportunities, LexJam offers the singular opportunity for musicians of various talent levels, experience, influence, and genre to meet on the same stage. That dynamic - a group of people coming together to create something new, unexpected, and spontaneous, while avoiding any sort of "snobbish stratifications" - is the community development model that Thompson and Martin intend LexJam to reflect.
"We had to ward off some temptation to make it too structured," said Thompson, "and then also stay within some boundary of structure It's more to the side of some evolutionary magic that happens."
A MasterCard commercial might cite the "evolutionary magic" that occurs in a jam session as "priceless," but in fact a certain amount of resources were a necessary precursor of LexJam. Securing equipment and a space to play were the two first steps; additionally, Thompson and Martin agreed to hire a sound engineer. Fortunately, local businesses were eager to step up with donations to get things going in the early stages, while a major national retailer, Wal-Mart, has now provided a grant. The Lexington Center donated stage space on the bottom level near the Convention Center, in addition to the use of a grand piano and the labor of their facilities crew. Carl's Music and Willcutt Guitars offered deep discounts on equipment (Fender amp, a Korg keyboard). Thomas & King, Paragon Family Practice, Keeneland, and Phil Holoubek (president of Lexington's Real Estate Company) have all made financial donations to LexJam.
These businesses have chosen to invest in LexJam for reasons that extend beyond having their name appear on a banner behind the stage.
"My wife and I made a personal financial contribution because this supports the civic goals and objectives that we have for Lexington," said Holoubek, who is currently developing Main & Rose as well as the Nunn Building on Short Street and Martin Luther King, in an e-mail. "We are committed to helping make Lexington a world-class city that has in place the amenities necessary to recruit and retain knowledge-based young professionalswe feel that a thriving music scene is also a necessity in attracting these young professionals."
Keeneland and Thomas & King also cited wishes to support efforts to revitalize the local art scene and initiatives that positively impact the quality of life in Lexington as reasons they chose to support LexJam. And when Wal-Mart got word of the series, the retail giant, in conjunction with the opening of its new Neighborhood Store on Saron Drive, provided what Martin said is a "significant grant to ensure we have what we need to make this an enjoyable experience for the musicians and music lovers of Lexington."
"Our goal is to either re-energize, or energize, a community that we know is there, that has not been stimulated," said Thompson, who was originally inspired by weekly jam sessions in Sarasota.
Those unfamiliar with jam sessions sometimes find it difficult to understand the semantics of a jam session, and those who have participated in jams often find it equally hard to explain. In a way, jam sessions reflect real societal constructs, according to EKU professor and LexJam participant Larry Nelson, who is currently doing doctoral work on the "The Social Construction of the Jam Session." While there are no written rules, for a jam session to be successful it must operate under an unspoken "combination of consensus and negotiation." As Nelson explained, there are no written rules saying "don't park your car in the middle of the road." When you do it, you just know it's wrong. Likewise, musicians in a jam session generally know right from wrong on potential issues, such as stepping on someone's solo or pushing someone offstage, and generally, those issues never surface.
According to Thompson, LexJam operates under the basic elementary rules outlined in Robert Folghum's All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten:
"Be Nice. Don't mess with other people's stuff. Clean up your mess. Don't be the star of the show, just be part of the show."
Maybe we all have something to learn (or relearn) from these tenets.
LexJam is scheduled for the first Saturday in February, and the second Saturday of each month from March-April, from 2-5 p.m. in the Lexington Center. All "talented amateurs" are invited to participate.
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