I was playing Old Time with a bunch of people last weekend, in groups of 2 to 25, and was trying to pay attention to Sue's original question: How does it work? I noticed a couple of thin1gs:
1) Everyone is *trying* to play together. Meaning everyone wants to have fun and play together, so they are trying to adjust to others. Once the jam got big, you couldn't really hear everybody anyway, so that didn't happen as much, but was still OK. But imagine when someone starts a tune slower than you are used to...you adjust your playing to the new tempo to make it work.
2) When playing melody, I had some tunes where my version was different from the others. I noticed a couple of things: when I tried to adapt to their playing, it didn't always work, but it did work when I played my own thing, and they played theirs. Sure for two measures or so, we were playing different things, but it was fine. It strikes me as an kind of like learning a tune on the fly in a jam, which I am not great at. But at least for me, the first parts I pick up are the beginnings and endings of phrases*, and when those parts line up, that's half the battle of playing together.
3) Almost everyone is playing at least a slightly different version of the tune. I know that i rarely play a tune the same way as it repeats over and over, and that is true for others, too. Sometimes that is intentional!
4) The hardest time I had was a one-to-one jam, when we weren't really clicking together, but we only got two tunes in before we were called away to a bigger jam. I think a few more minutes would have gotten us somewhere, but who knows?
*Have you ever described a tune to someone as "something, something, finish on the root"? I have, for tunes I kind of know.
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