page_title: Jam band
section_title: Taping
hierarchical_section_title: Jam band / Taping
caption_attribution_description: English: Taper section at Telluride Bluegrass Festival June 2007.
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: Jam bands often allow their fans to make tapes or recordings of their live shows, a practice which many other musical genres call "illegal bootlegging". The Grateful Dead encouraged this practice, which helped to create a thriving scene around the collecting and trading of recordings of Grateful Dead live performances. Most of the live shows on the Grateful Dead's 30 years of touring were recorded. It was probably the trading of recordings of Grateful Dead shows which built the band's fan base.
  Starting in 1984, the band recognized the fact that people were already "unofficially" taping their shows, so they started to sell taper tickets for a taper's section which allowed the tapers to bring their microphones and tape decks to record with, as well as wrangle the tapers into one area of the venue so to keep them from interfering with other concertgoers.  This type of encouragement has spread to nearly all of the jam bands. Some jam band enthusiasts argue that if a band does not allow fans to tape their live shows, this band is not a jam band in the Grateful Dead tradition.
  Fans trade recordings and collect recordings of different live shows because improvisational jam bands play their songs differently at each performance and generally mix up their setlists to encourage fans to see them on multiple nights. Fans collect various versions of their favorite songs and actively debate which is the "best version" of any particular song, keeping lists of notable versions of those songs.
  They keep track of how many times a specific song has been played and note the frequency of performances of certain songs, and note the relative rarity or commonality of its performance during certain years.  This increases the momentousness of a rare song being dusted off and played live, or played for the first time. Some bands play with this phenomenon by throwing short little "teases" into their sets. Playing, for example, a few bars of a famous cover song or hinting at a popular jam and then either never getting around to playing the song, or coming back to it after an extended jam. The use of segues to blend strings of songs is another mark of a jam band, and one which makes for treasured tapes.
caption: A forest of microphone stands at a taper section at Telluride Bluegrass Festival in June 2007.
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