page_title: Jam band
section_title: Debate
hierarchical_section_title: Jam band / History / Modern use and definition / Debate
caption_attribution_description: English: The Derek Trucks Band performing at the Granada Theater in Dallas, TX on April 21, 2005.
context_page_description: A jam band is a musical group whose live albums and concerts relate to a fan culture that began in the 1960s with the Grateful Dead, who held lengthy improvisational "jams" during their concerts. These include extended musical improvisation over rhythmic grooves and chord patterns, and long sets of music which often cross genre boundaries.
  The jam band musical style spawned from the psychedelic rock movement of the 1960s. The Grateful Dead and The Allman Brothers Band became notable for their live improvisational jams and regular touring schedules, which continued into the 1990s. This influenced a new wave of jam bands in the late 1980s and early 1990s, who toured the United States with jam band-style concerts, such as Phish, Blues Traveler, Widespread Panic, Dave Matthews Band, The String Cheese Incident, and Col. Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit. The jam band movement gained mainstream exposure in the United States in the early 1990s following the rise of Phish and the Dave Matthews Band as major touring acts and the dissolution of the Grateful Dead following Jerry Garcia's death in 1995.
  Jam band artists often perform a wide variety of genres.
context_section_description: Some artists such as The Derek Trucks Band are known for resisting the jam band label. Dave Schools of Widespread Panic said in an interview, "We want to shake free of that name, jam band. The jam band thing used to be the Grateful Dead bands. We shook free of that as hard as we could back in 1989. Then Blues Traveler came on the scene. All together, we created the H.O.R.D.E. tour, which focused a lot of attention on jam bands. Then someone coined the term jam bands. I'd rather just be called retro. When you pigeonhole something, you limit its ability to grow and change." An example of a prior-era band that gained the label "jam band" through an active affiliation with the 1990s jam band culture is The Allman Brothers Band. However, Gregg Allman has been quoted as recently as 2003 by his fellow band member Butch Trucks in stating that rather than being a jam band The Allman Brothers are "a band that jams".
  Although Trucks suggests that this is only a difference of semantics, the term has a recent history for which it is used exclusively. An example of this discernment is the acceptance of Les Claypool as a jam band in the year 2000. Though famed from an entire decade with Primus (a band that jams) and solo works, it was in creating the Fearless Flying Frog Brigade with members of Ratdog and releasing Live Frogs Set 1 that as Budnick has stated: "marked [Claypool's] entry into [the jamband] world." Budnick has been both editor-in-chief of Jambands.com and executive editor of Relix Magazine.
caption: The Derek Trucks Band
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