Jam Sessions Research Articles

From Jam Session to Recital: Synchronous Communication and Collaboration Around Data in Organizations.

Prior research on communicating with visualization has focused on public presentation and asynchronous individual consumption, such as in the domain of journalism. The visualization research community knows comparatively little about synchronous and multimodal communication around data within organizations, from team meetings to executive briefings. We conducted two qualitative interview studies with individuals who prepare and deliver presentations about data to audiences in organizations. In contrast to prior work, we did not limit our interviews to those who self-identify as data analysts or data scientists. Both studies examined aspects of speaking about data with visual aids such as charts, dashboards, and tables. One study was a retrospective examination of current practices and difficulties, from which we identified three scenarios involving presentations of data. We describe these scenarios using an analogy to musical performance: small collaborative team meetings are akin to jam session, while more structured presentations can range from semi-improvisational performances among peers to formal recitals given to executives or customers. In our second study, we grounded the discussion around three design probes, each examining a different aspect of presenting data: the progressive reveal of visualization to direct attention and advance a narrative, visualization presentation controls that are hidden from the audience's view, and the coordination of a presenter's video with interactive visualization. Our distillation of interviewees' responses surfaced twelve themes, from ways of authoring presentations to creating accessible and engaging audience experiences.

CBreath: Co-Design a Collaborative Breathing Experience to Create Interpersonal Connectedness

The need for interpersonal connectedness and the possibility of applying collaborative breathing in technological artifacts for mediating connectedness has led to the idea of devising an experience that applies internal, physiological synchronization aided by technology to create connectedness. The aim of this research is to explore how to use co-design to help understand jam session performers’ insights on their expected sensory experiences related to interpersonal connectedness and how to devise technological artifacts to meet their needs to establish internal connectedness with each other. In this research-led design project, an iteration model of a series of speculative co-design workshops, prototyping and testing was proposed and applied based on the concept of co-design. The design outcome—CBreath—presents a way of using collaborative breathing to create connectedness between the performers, externalizing their synchronized breathing by multi-sensory experiences via light, wind, and dynamic objects and making such effects parts of the jam session. This research demonstrates the feasibility of incorporating the iterative speculative co-design model into experience-oriented design of technology to ethically design for interpersonal connectedness. Such a design research approach can be further improved and applied in future technological artifact development to prioritize people’s expected experiences of establishing interpersonal connectedness in different contexts.

The experience of musical jamming: Testing the fit of a model of hermeneutic phenomenology of spirituality in music education

The authors sought to test the fit of a new model of spirituality in music education by examining one jamming session through a hermeneutic phenomenological lens. In accordance with the work of Van der Merwe and Habron, the authors employ four lifeworld existentials as categories by which to organize the experience of the five musicians involved in a particular jam session. Participant researcher narratives are analyzed for fit with the model, and an analysis is reported. These narratives seem to support the existence of the guideposts inherent to the model. Furthermore, the researchers present a model as a way for situating the spirituality model in the context of an understanding of person, product, process, press, and position to inform the literature in creativity.

The Repertoire of Jazz Jam Sessions in N.Y.

The Repertoire of Jazz Jam Sessions in N.Y.

Advocating for The Sustainability of Semai Indigenous Music Through The Collaborative Creation of New Traditional Music: A Participatory Action Research (PAR) Methodology

This article provides a critical reflection on the participatory approach methodology and the collaborative creation approach used in an advocacy project to sustain the musical heritage of the indigenous Semai community in Malaysia. These approaches were examined through the medium of an advocacy project that aimed to stimulate the interest of Semai youth in traditional music through relevance, engagement, and connection with their current musical interest and skills. The intention of the project was to also co-create new traditional music with the Semai youth through live musical interaction, improvisation and jam sessions with the research team. This article explored the research team’s use of the “Participatory Action Research” (PAR) method, which involved planning, action, observation, reflection, and revision during the initial stages of our advocacy project. Our findings suggest a narrative style in discussing advocacy processes because they occur in a lateral than the linear or cyclical format used in current action research models. Findings also reveal that any attempts to advocate change in the community would firstly require an established relationship of trust, respect, and belief in the research team. The research team would have to have had prior involvement, commitment, and dedication to the community before members of the team could influence change among the community. A self-review of the research team’s effort to co-create new traditional music with Semai youth led to the conclusion that co-creation between musicians of different musical training would require a “new” compositional method that negotiates Western musical composition techniques with the oral tradition of creating music.

Playing with the enemy: Investigating the impact of musical peacebuilding.

Musical performances are frequently used in peacebuilding initiatives. Can performing music together indeed change interpersonal and intergroup perceptions of the other as the enemy? Using contact theory for our theoretical framework, we hypothesize that the specific mechanism of listening during active music-making helps to establish the positive effects of intergroup contact. Additionally, we explore to what extent participants become peace facilitators when returning to their home environments. In two small-scale studies, we find preliminary support for active listening as a mechanism of trust-enhancing contact. However, this effect mainly surfaces in unstructured encounters within the larger organized structure, like late-night chamber music jam sessions. Repeated participation builds the necessary trust for a new common ingroup. Because participation is mostly driven by career and performance motivations, we argue that peacebuilding through musical performances may help overcome the common selection bias in research on contact theory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Pippi's Pancakes - Culinary Jam Sessions in the School Library

Project-based learning is a way of working which is gaining ground in Swedish schools. The Swedish Government has recently decreed that senior high school students must carry out a fairly extensive piece of research in the form of a project. The project has to be finished in one and a half years from preparatory planning to final presentation. Working with projects has now more clearly made the School Library in Sweden into an educational resource. In our seminar we will give you some idea of how project-based learning is being practised as teamwork between librarians, students and teachers in two Swedish senior high school libraries. We show how we guide teachers and students in our libraries, now well equipped with traditional media as well as modern technology. We will also point out specific problems that we meet and draw attention to new thinking about learning in modern society.

Jam Session for Seasoned Freelancers

The Jam Session for Seasoned Freelancers was born of the realization that when experienced freelancers get together and “talk shop,” the topics of interest and concern are often much different from those of both new and less-experienced freelancers. The open session is typically conducted with participants seated in a large circle where everyone is equal, and everyone is invited to ask questions and offer advice. Moving in 2020 to the virtual format proved that this open and interactive (gently controlled) session fluidly translates to the virtual environment. As always, the Jam Session (held virtually in 2 smaller sessions instead of 1 large session) elicited a lot of important and insightful discussion. Several themes rose to the top: finances, contracts, and life after coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). In this article, members of the Freelance Forum have joined virtually to add their comments to the topics that were discussed. Contributors include Brian Bass Cathryn D. Evans Sherri Bowen Melissa L. Bogen

The Study of Musicians’ Awareness of Jazz Club and Jam Session

The Study of Musicians’ Awareness of Jazz Club and Jam Session

Anyone Can Improvise

The concept of improvisation and the “Jazz Model” for Entrepreneurship as a gathering of creative minds with the goal of creating a new outcome is frequently used in the entrepreneurship literature. Especially the unique setting of a jazz jam session exemplifies a successful model of group creativity. Herzig and Baker (2014) identified seven factors that guide jam sessions and Belitski and Herzig (2018) transferred and exemplified these factors to various business entrepreneurship models. This case study traces the entrepreneurial efforts of Jamey Aebersold, David Baker, and Jerry Coker, the ABC’s of jazz education who developed the foundation for teaching materials and curricula worldwide. Furthermore, this case study demonstrates the entrepreneurial mindset of these three innovators as a result of their training in the jazz idiom and suggests strategies for entrepreneurship education.

150 Years of Choro – Where Are We Now?

According to a Brazilian saying, choro is the father of samba and the grandfather of bossa nova. Starting off as a way of interpreting European music with an African twist, it developed from a lower middle-class style played for fun and without monetary ambition to one of Brazil’s most revered genres, played by all classes. Choro fell in and out of fashion various times: It was declared to be the embodiment of Brazilianness in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1970s, and almost vanished twice (in the 1950s and 1960s, and from the 1980s into the early 1990s), because it was considered old-fashioned. When exactly choro saw the light of day, is a matter of discussion. This will be described in the article. We come to the conclusion that choro can claim to be 150 years old and has now reached its most diverse stage so far. It boasts a fairly good infrastructure with institutes, schools, concerts, jam sessions, sheet music, method books, books, an online magazine, CDs, films, radio broadcasts, TV productions, websites, and diligent studies, both by instrumentalists and scholars. Furthermore, it is by now played on all inhabited continents.

A drum, deferred

During the 1960s, West African musicians rattled the New York jazz scene, bringing new sounds to late-night jam sessions, recording studios, and jazz festivals. Jazz scholars have interpreted musical imaginations of Africa by American jazz musicians as a sign of pan-African solidarity and cultural affinity among musicians of African and Afrodiasporic ancestry. While these studies have been important in identifying the political implications of such collaborations for African American musicians, they underplay the complex positioning of West African immigrants in these contexts and the social and musical gaps that separate African immigrants from their American counterparts. Drawing on my work with composer and percussionist Solomon Ilori, one of the leading Yoruba musicians in New York and amongst the last living exponents of the African jazz scene of the 1960s, I use the notion of décalage to explore how linguistic, social and historical gaps are articulated in musical recordings and public concerts in the 1960s African jazz scene in New York. Originally coined by Léopold Senghor to describe a sense of discrepancy between Africans and African Americans, décalage allows me to show how different perceptions of time, as well as choice of repertoire, instrumentation, rhythmic patterns and melodic material complicate a notion of musical pan-Africanism. Moreover, it explicates the unique ways in which African immigrants reacted socially and musically to the boundaries they face in the US and its particular formations of national, racial and musical identity.

Felix and the Monsters by Josh Holtsclaw

Reviewed by: Felix and the Monsters by Josh Holtsclaw Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Holtsclaw, Josh Felix and the Monsters; written and illus. by Josh and Monica Holtsclaw. Paulsen/Penguin, 2020 [32p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780593110522 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780593110539 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R 4-7 yrs Felix is supposed to guard the wall and keep out the little monsters that live on the other side, but he'd really prefer to be rocking out with his keytar. The other guards won't join his jam sessions, but one day one of his epic solos draws a little red creature, with guitar in hand, over the wall, and after some music-making Felix follows monster Dot to the other side. It's a bustling place of creativity in Dot's world, with painters, poets, and even sculptors working in cheddar cheese. His fellow guards, however, have noticed his absence and are headed over the wall, fully prepared to attack—until they hear some of Felix and friends' sweet tunes and bust out into some groovy moves themselves. Like Agee's The Wall in the Middle of the Book (BCCB 11/18), this makes timely commentary on the purpose of walls in current cultural discourse, and it also speaks to the universal connections of art, two premises that could have tipped into treacly sentiment but are fortunately tempered by the book's bubbly, self-amused glee. The digital art is a riot of vibrant colors and loose geometry, with the squat, square, grumpy-looking guards distinctly different from the rounder, wide-eyed monsters, and Felix a combination of both angles and curves. This could obviously make a discussion starter about overcoming differences, but it could just as well serve as a jazzy opener to a dance party. [End Page 23] Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Ghost Wood Song by Erica Waters

Reviewed by: Ghost Wood Song by Erica Waters Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Waters, Erica Ghost Wood Song. Harper, 2020 [368p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780062894229 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780062894243 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 7-10 High schooler Shady can play a mean fiddle, but she could never match her deceased father, who was able to raise the dead with his music. She's going to have to figure out his tricks soon, however, because now her brother Jesse has been accused of her stepfather's murder, and the only way Shady can prove his innocence is to hear from the dead man himself and find out who the true killer is. The secrets behind her dad's talents, however, are darker than she realized and connected to a painful family past that neither her mother or aunt want to talk about; Jesse even seems willing to take the fall for a crime he didn't commit to keep Shady from messing around with the dead. Unfortunately, the ghostly elements never reach true creepiness here, with both the story of Shady's family's past and the urgency of Jesse's current situation often interrupted by Shady's love triangle with her best friend and a new guy, and the tension stutters as focus shifts among the various storylines with little direction. What it lacks in terror, however, it makes up for in atmosphere with Shady's rustic drawl tinging her narration, and her descriptions of playing are lyrical, connecting her grief over her father and chaotic family to an eerie folklore-inspired song. Readers looking for a spine-chilling scare will want to check out Parker's Beware the Wild (BCCB 12/14), but for those who love a good jam session and a bit of folklore, Shady's tale may satisfy. [End Page 499] Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Intercambio: A Visual History of Nuevo Teatro from the Ana Olivarez-Levinson Photography Collection

IntercambioA Visual History of Nuevo Teatro from the Ana Olivarez-Levinson Photography Collection Ana Olivarez-Levinson (bio) and Eric Mayer-García (bio) Archiving is Organizing and Communicating: How I Used My Camera to Raise Consciousness of the Chicano Movement Ana Olivarez-Levinson I started collecting materials related to Chicano/Latino Teatro as early as 1973. After graduating from high school, I returned to LA to reconnect with my grand-mother and extended family members for a temporary visit. My parents, siblings, and I had left LA in 1971 and moved to Houston, Texas. During one of my walks in East LA, I came across a Summer Park program while Chicano songwriter Agustín Lira was entertaining a group of children with his culturally empowering Spanish-language tunes. During the conversation, he introduced himself as having performed with a group of musicians during the Delano, California, grape strike headed by Cesar E. Chavez. I had been missing and yearning to reconnect with the thriving Chicano movement that I left behind in my hometown of LA. I was hungry for mexicano cultural information. At the park and rec center, I spotted a poster announcing a play titled La Gran Carpa de los Rasquachis, performed and written by El Teatro Campesino.1 I was so excited to [End Page 169] be able to witness something I strongly connected to on different levels. I took multiple pictures with my cheap Kodak, as was my hobby in LA, with the intention of sharing them with my friends and family in Texas. After seeing the performance of Teatro Campesino, I remember saying to myself, “That’s what I want to do in the future.” The consciousness-raising and cultural message transmitted in the art form was what stuck with me. I wasn’t inspired to become a great “actress.” It was the process, the way the message was delivered, that inspired me to later do exactly that. However, the real sharing of the photos from the Campesino performance began a year later, in 1974, when I participated in a summer academic prep program for incoming Latino freshmen at the University of Houston. At the request of a Latina English instructor teaching Chicano literature, I agreed to share with the class my collection of East LA photos. The pictures included the Estrada Project murals painted on the walls of East LA housing projects as well as photos of Teatro Campesino’s performance. The experience of sharing these photos with my peers allowed me to see the value in the documentation process, in the sharing process, in the dissemination of information. The students and the staff all were interested and respectful of my early involvement and immersion in a dynamic cultural movement they had not yet experienced. As a nineteen-yearold, I became the messenger of Chicano culture from East LA to these incoming freshmen attending the University of Houston. My pictures became a tool for sharing information otherwise not seen or celebrated in mainstream media, much less in the university culture. I started taking pictures and eventually collecting them. My early teatro experiences date back to my first freshman semester, fall 1974. The same instructor that had asked me to share my LA photos requested my assistance in helping to direct two plays, both by Teatro Campesino. The work of Luis Valdez, director and playwright of Teatro Campesino, had a major influence on all aspiring Chicano theatre beginners, including myself. The instructor agreed to give me a well-deserved credit in the next semester once I registered in her Chicano literature class. Since I was directing, I was able to take photos as the action was unfolding. In 1975, at age twenty, I attended the TENAZ (Teatros Nacionales de Aztlán) teatro festival (aka the Chicano Theatre Festival) in San Antonio, Texas. I was the only person able to attend the festival from the teatro I was involved with at the time, Teatro Tejano. I took photos of all the performances, workshops, and social interactions in late-night jam sessions. The primary goal was not only to return to the Houston group to share this rich historical experience reflected [End Page 170] by the multiple...

Tommy Thompson: New-Timey String Band Musician by Lewis M. Stern

Reviewed by: Tommy Thompson: New-Timey String Band Musician by Lewis M. Stern Mark Allan Jackson Tommy Thompson: New-Timey String Band Musician. By Lewis M. Stern. Contributions to Southern Appalachian Studies. (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2019. Pp. xvi, 231. Paper, $39.95, ISBN 978-1-4766-7508-4.) Tommy Thompson is an old-time music hero. Along with many other young people in the 1960s, he got caught up in the folk music revival, picking up the banjo and plucking along with neophytes in the Chapel Hill, North Carolina, area. Unlike most, he did not stop performing traditional tunes for adoring audiences until early onset Alzheimer's disease robbed him of his abilities in the mid-1990s and eventually his life in 2003. Although his name may not ring out in the same manner as Mike Seeger's or John Cohen's, Thompson's legacy marks him as an important link between little-known traditional Appalachian and Piedmont players from the early twentieth century and many leading stringband musicians of today. Now Lewis M. Stern's Tommy Thompson: NewTimey String Band Musician appears as a tribute to a man who dedicated himself to America's root music. As Stern notes early on, "This book is my attempt to represent the parts of Tommy that combined to make a whole that was at once bigger, more consequential, forceful, and creative … than any of the singular dimensions that contributed to the sum of the parts" (p. 6). Thus, readers get sections on [End Page 756] Thompson's college football career at the University of Florida and Kenyon College, his stint as a philosophy doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his efforts as a playwright and an actor, and his many other activities, all undertaken by a man who constantly reached out for new challenges. But the bulk of the book focuses on Thompson's musical efforts, because once he took up the banjo, it continued to be his most reliable companion and collaborator. The book contains dozens of photographs of Thompson cradling a number of instruments through the years, all of them discussed in detail in the appendix under the heading "Tommy's Banjos." Thompson first learned to play the five-string banjo by following Pete Seeger's tried-and-true method, but then he expanded his style through extensive jam sessions with other players drawn to bluegrass and old-time music, especially fiddler Alan Jabbour. Together they formed the Hollow Rock String Band in 1966, along with Thompson's wife, Bobbie Thompson, on guitar and Bertram Levy on mandolin. But it was through Jabbour, a folklorist, that many old-time tunes came to Thompson's attention. They took up old fiddle tunes and expanded them for their ensemble. This approach, looking to the past for material but then shifting it to fit present musical tastes, became Thompson's trademark, not only in his work with his most lasting and important band, the Red Clay Ramblers, but also with his many solo efforts. To limn this tale of the banjoist, Stern draws heavily on the Tommy Thompson Collection in the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but he also undertook more than eighty interviews with Thompson's family, friends, associates, and fans. Certainly, the research necessary to any scholarly biography has been done as part of this project. But the many threads that the author takes up make for a rather fragmented narrative, for it begins as a dry biography that sometimes lingers on rather uninspired details, such as Thompson's individual grades in junior-high and high school. Then, the book solely centers on Thompson's musical odyssey for several chapters, even as it largely ignores other important aspects of his life, such as his marriages and children. A chapter on his philosophical and education history then interrupts before the book again returns to and ends on the focus on his musicianship and artistry. All these moves tend to leave the reader with a less than fully rounded sense of Thompson, even as Stern's book celebrates a man who has made an important mark on...

Jazz jem sessions in the aspect of listener perception

The purpose of the article is to identify the characteristic features ofjazz jam sessions as creative and concert events. The research methods arebased on the use of a number of empirical approaches. The historicalmethod has characterized the periodization of the emergence andpopularity of jam session as an artistic phenomenon. The use of themethod of comparison of jazz jam sessions and jazz concert made itpossible to determine the characteristic features of jams. An appeal toaxiological research methods has identified the most strikingimprovisational solos of leading jazz artists. Of particular importance inthe context of the article are the methods of analysis and synthesis,observation and generalization. It is important to pay attention to the use ofa structural-functional scientific-research method that indicates theeffectiveness of technological and execution processes on jams. Scientificinnovation. The article is about discovering the peculiarities of the jamsession phenomenon and defining the role of interaction between theaudience of improviser listeners and musicians throughout the jams. Theprocesses of development of jazz concerts and improvisations at jamsessions are revealed. Conclusions. The scientific research providedconfirms the fact that system of interactions between musicians amongthemselves and the audience, as well as improvisation of the performers atthe jam sessions is immense and infinite. That is why modern jazz singersand the audience will always strive for its development and understanding.This way is worth starting with repeated listening to improvisation, in theimmediate presence of the jam sessions (both participant and listener).

Review: Patrick Burke, Come in and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008 (hbk). xiv + 314pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-226-08071-0

Patrick Burke, Come in and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008 (hbk). xiv + 314pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-226-08071-0.Ever since Philip Bohlman and Ronald Radano published their groundbreaking collection of essays, Music and the Racial Imagination, there has been a steady stream of studies exploring and extending the questions it raised about how musical practice relates to racial categories and racist discourse. Patrick Burke's study of the racial politics of jazz on 52nd Street in New York City explicitly takes its cue from this research. Beginning in the 1930s, when the famous Onyx Club emerged as a kind of unofficial 'workingmen's club' for studio musicians, and following the rise of 52nd Street as a major commercial centre in the 1940s, Burke develops a subtle and detailed analysis of the racial dynamics of jazz production and reception. His focus is on 'the mutual influence between musical style and racial representation' (p. 5) as these took shape within and around the area of 52nd Street.Clubs such as the Onyx, the Spotlight, the Three Deuces, Jimmy Ryan's and many others are etched into jazz mythology, not the least by William Gottlieb's famous photograph of 52nd Street, which he took in July 1948. The neon signs above the clubs proclaim the myth as powerfully as do the many stories and images we have of what was going on inside. They announced to musicians and audiences alike not only the growing popularity of jazz, but also the new conception of jazz performance that was taking shape there, encapsulated in the after-hours jam sessions and small-group swing bands. The regular appearance of performers such as Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, Art Tatum and Dizzy Gillespie in the clubs, along with the musicians' emphasis on spontaneity and virtuosity as essential features, reinforces the claim that it was there, on 52nd Street, that jazz underwent a transformation from popular entertainment into a modernist art form, a change that was mirrored in the stylistic movement from swing to bebop.Broadly speaking, Come in and Hear the Truth is about the problem of conceptualizing this transformation. Most accounts of jazz history explain key moments of change in terms of a succession of styles, usually embodied in the work of a 'canon' of great (sometimes even heroic) performers and composers and measured against a set of core musical conventions. Taken together, these conventions form what is meant when performers and critics refer to the 'jazz tradition'. The transition from one style to the next involves artists in a thorough-going revision of this tradition, mostly by reconstituting those conventions that have become worn out, cliched or no longer meaningful. The really great players or composers are those individuals who are able to do this, to reinvent the music's language and gestures without destroying jazz in the process. An exemplary text in this regard is Martin Williams's The Jazz Tradition, in which the shift from swing to bebop is understood in terms of the individuals who made it possible. In Williams's study, 52nd Street exists only as a colourful backdrop to a story that is ostensibly about the individual artist's capacity to transform the musical materials they find in the work of their predecessors and, thus, to find new ways of rediscovering and, ultimately, overcoming the essential problems the jazz tradition presents them with.By focusing our attention on 52nd Street-'the street that never slept', in Arnold Shaw's famous phrase-Burke moves the question of change in an entirely different direction. Jazz styles appear in conjunction with each other, jostling for attention, their identity emerging from a complex cross-fertilization of ideas and methods, personnel and practices, rather than as successive stages of an evolutionary movement. Individual performers certainly shape what is happening, but not independently of the groups and clubs and recording studios within which they lived and worked. …

Performing Rhythms of the Brazilian Bateria

Bateria (bah-teh-REE-ah) means drum set in Portuguese. In terms of Brazilian samba music, the bateria is the percussion ensemble driving the groove of the whole samba band. Organizing a batucada (bah-tooKAH-dah), a Brazilian percussion jam session, is possible in general music classes throughout elementary and secondary school. The necessary instruments are easily available through percussion and educator websites. In addition, quality online tutorials are easily accessible.

Uke, flow and Rock‘n’Roll

Community ukulele groups’ fertile contexts for participatory and amateur musicking are increasing in popularity. Though researchers have begun to describe contexts for community ukulele groups, more research is necessary to understand participants’ perceptions of their lived-experiences within the space of the jam sessions. Therefore, the purpose of this phenomenological case study is to describe the lived experiences of adults participating in a community ukulele group. Several research questions guided this study. First, what do they experience during jam sessions, and how do they describe their experiences? Second, how do these experiences relate to their sense of musical self? Third, what mechanisms impact their perceptions of their experiences? Three distinct but related ideas constitute the theoretical framework for this study: Turino’s concept of participatory performance, Csikszentmihaly’s flow theory, and Turner’s concept of communitas. Data were individual interviews and small-group re-enactment interviews with eleven community ukulele participants. The essence of the experience was that liminal space emerged in the context of the jam sessions and supported communitas that resulted in temporary transformation of identity and transcendence of concerns. This essence was supported by three themes: characteristics of liminal space, manifestations of communitas, and transformation and transcendence.