Whether she’s hosting a jam session or singing and playing in one, Kerry Rosenthal repeats to herself a mantra she learned years ago from another veteran Upper Valley musician.
And from time to time, she needs to say aloud the words that East Barnard resident Randy Leavitt often spoke during his jam sessions at South Royalton’s old freight house.
“If you can’t add anything,” Rosenthal, a resident of Taftsville who sings and plays guitar with Rose Hip Jam and other area roots ensembles, said this week, “stop playing and start listening.”
So goes the guiding principle at sessions around the Upper Valley, from Rosenthal’s monthly, by-invitation jam at Bridgewater’s Farmhouse Inn to the bluegrass-flavored one that fiddler/bassist Jakob Breitbach leads every Tuesday at The Filling Station in White River Junction, and the Celtic- and Quebecois-oriented jam that fiddler Emerson Gale started this month at Barrett Hall in South Royalton.
“People will come in with more old-timey tunes that I’m still getting familiar with,” Breitbach said this week. “While I can pick up anything anyone else plays in my genre, when it’s something that’s still new to me, I’m apt to listen, rather than jump in on the fly.”
Gale found himself observing as much as playing during the inaugural Barrett Hall session.
“At peak, we had about 12 folks performing in the circle, which is a lot for the local area,” Gale, who teaches music and serves on the board of directors at Seven Stars Arts Center in Sharon, said on Tuesday, “We’re a little off the beaten track there, but the space seems perfect. It went from 7 to 11 with constant tunes and a lot of laughs in between. There was a core group of fiddlers, but we also had a cellist, a flute player, people who played spoons. And there was a member of the Vermont Fiddle Orchestra who came from Montpelier, and afterward said it was well worth the trip.”
Soon after moving to Strafford from the San Francisco Bay area last fall, Gale made a point of attending some of the bi-monthly jams that Bill Shepard organizes in Union Village and the weekly one at Ken’s Barber Shop in Randolph, the better to get the lay of the roots-music land.
“I realized, ‘Wow! There are so many artists in this area,’ ” Gale recalled. “It just seemed like such a happening area.”
Emerging and veteran musicians alike have long used open-mic nights at bars and coffeehouses as a platform to hone their performance chops. Meanwhile, jam sessions — some relatively private affairs, others welcoming audiences in public places — have served as a mix of group therapy, community bonding, festival-style workshops and rehearsals.
Breitbach describes The Filling Station jam as “an acoustic pickin’ circle” and “a meet-and-greet,” modeled, in part, after the pickin’ session that Dave Clark and Dan Freihofer used to co-host at The Skinny Pancake in Hanover when it first opened. That’s where Breitbach and his wife Jes Raymond, a Hartford native and fellow musician, got to know the music scene after relocating from Seattle in October 2016.
“In metropolitan areas like Seattle, the weeknight jams tend to bring in more local pros and touring professionals,” said Breitbach. “Here, it’s mostly amateur pickers with day jobs who are all top-quality pickers and singers and writers, people like (fiddler) Jen Friese from Still Hill. I’ve been really impressed.”
As word has gotten around about The Filling Station jam, which began as a celebration of Breitbach’s 36th birthday in March 2017 and then evolved, the average age of the pickers has dropped and the gender demographic has diversified.
“It’s a good smattering of folks now,” he said. “We’ve been bringing in more people from farther away, and there’s a lot more younger folks and more gals, not just a lot of dudes playing guitar.”
In Strafford, Emerson Gale is hoping to diversify the circle and the audience as well, when they settle on the next jam session for April.
“At the first one, it was mostly (people in their 50s and 60s), though we did get a guitarist from the Topsham area who was around 28,” Gale said. “In our listserv posts and the other forms of outreach, we’re making a point of saying, ‘All ages and levels welcome.’”
The jam sessions at The Filling Station in White River Junction start at 7 on Tuesday nights, and BALE Commons in South Royalton hosts a jam for string players on Friday nights at 6:30. For other sessions, watch the Entertainment Highlights column in the Thursday
James Patterson can be reached at jpatterson@vnews.com and at 603-727-3230. David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.
