July Issue Home | Editors | Features | Columns | Photos | Regional | New Groove Road Trip | Tour Journal | Venue | Levels | Ghosts | Homegrown | Inaudible | CDs | Charts

The Jam to Enlightenment

by Dave Rioux

---

What attracts me to a JamBand? Why do I like this style of music? Why did I want to go every night the Grateful Dead played in my area? Outside of my area? Why is it when I hear an aimlessly noodling guitar, my ears prick up and I'm suddenly hanging on every note?

While at work one day I popped in a tape of the Dead from The Who-Knows-Where Arena. After what I considered to be a reasonable amount of time, the song ended. I looked at my co-worker and said, "Wasn’' that great, man?! That was a 25 minute Fire on the Mountain!"

"25 minutes huh?" He said, "Seemed longer."

Not everyone feels like I do about music. Maybe that's why I go out of my way to catch up with someone on the highway who has "kindred" stickers on his bumper, window, hatchback, or all of the above. But WHY do I feel like I do about it?

Am I that different? If I was, then it wouldn't be so hard to get tickets sometimes. So then how come out of 70,000 people stuffed into a stadium, I can't find one who can describe it sufficiently enough to educate the media so that the day after a show I don't have to wince as I read the review in "The Daily Tattler." How come we all retreat to saying things like: "If you have to ask, you won't understand?"

I think it's for the same reasons a priest can't encompass the concept of God within the limited constraints of the spoken or written languages. Or whether or not it is possible to articulate the transition from human-doing, to human-being, to the final embodiment of the Bodhisattva. Languages do not suffice to describe the infinite with the finite.

The more I start to understand about me, the more I realize that when I have a good jam going on the stereo, and I start to get into that "zone" with the music, I start to transcend from the everyday into a realm of perfect meditation. When all else is washed away, there is only a pure bridge between myself and the ineffable. That bridge is music. The blending of harmony, rhythm, and melody; or rhythm and melody; maybe just rhythm. Whatever the form, the part that matters, is where I go.

Jim Morrison said "Music inflames temperament," which I see as a precise description on how the spirit is moved from great heights of ecstacy during a rhythmic pulse, to bottomless caverns of sorrow by the stroke of a deep minor chord. The unspoken spirit can grasp more in a single note, than I can write on this entire page.

There are scientific descriptions as to why, when a finger is placed upon a specific point on a taut string, a sound emerges that resonates at a particular frequency; that when combined with similar notes, produce a pleasing sound. When groups of these are arranged into numeric patterns, a melody can be produced, that when mixed with rhythms and vocal harmonies, etc.; produce a song, as it were.

So why is it when the rudiments of musical theory have become habitual for someone like Trey, does the concept of lucid jamming enter in. His description of entering a mental state where he can "Get out of the way, and let the music come through" defies and cancels out the scientific breakdown of music, but can still work within the same framework.

Is the level of consciousness Jesus spoke of as a result of prayer, similar to, or even the same as that of the meditative state reached by the Gyuto Monks of Tibet? Or the realm I enter while listening to the "Playin in the Band" from Veneta, Oregon on 8/27/72? Is that pure feeling of "oneness" with your surroundings the actual presence of God? (This of course is said with the assumption that this state has been achieved without chemical aid.) Are these levels of consciousness related to the feeling I get while in a drum circle, and the beat leaves my hand to strike the drum head before I can think about it? Or when Mickey Hart speaks of the primal rhythms we are all a part of, as he and Joseph Campbell explored the dove-tail joint of the universal consciousness?

Is that perfect blend that happens when a few guys get together to make music, and find the music making them, the real presence of the eternal? And would the same happen if we were not there to hear it? Or are we merely borrowing into it for a time? Tapping into the great rhythm resonating from the original beat: The Big Bang? Or are we actually regressing, trying to play along with the rhythm of the heart we heard in our mother's womb?

I don't know. What I do know is, that when I am there none of these questions exist. There is no need.