{"id":44,"date":"2007-09-09T13:22:22","date_gmt":"2007-09-09T20:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/in-which-i-join-a-folk-jam-session\/"},"modified":"2013-12-01T19:09:41","modified_gmt":"2013-12-02T02:09:41","slug":"in-which-i-join-a-folk-jam-session","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/in-which-i-join-a-folk-jam-session","title":{"rendered":"In which I join a folk jam session…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagine a room full of musicians playing all sorts of old-timey, bluegrass and folk melodies. Yet amidst the expected mass of mandolins, gaggle of guitars, bunch of banjos and fistful of fiddles there are—not one, but—two ukuleles!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yep, I was invited to an informal folk jam session frequented by local players at Augie’s Coffee<\/a> down in Chico. Michael (whom I’d bought my fiddle from) told me about the monthly gathering on Friday afternoon and I decided to give it a try. I’d read from others on various forums that some folk musicians are open to ukuleles—and some aren’t. Thankfully this group was of the welcoming type!<\/p>\n

I arrived with my little soprano LoPrinzi and within 30 minutes was sandwiched between mandolins, with a stand-up bass behind me. Mark came along—he spent the time working on his computer, taking some photos for me and enjoying the music with the other patrons at the shop.<\/p>\n

We played a range of songs which I’d never head of (that’s just not been my repertoire—at least up until now!); most were in the keys of D, A and even E (arghh! I hate the E chord in first position; I ended up doing the 4-4-4-7 version) but there were a few tunes in G and even C.<\/p>\n

No chord charts, for the most part (although Bernie, from the Butte Folk Music Society,<\/a> who played mandolin beside me, was generous in sharing those songs that had them). I discovered that my ability to “hear” chord changes and anticipate the chord progressions improved almost magically as the afternoon went on.<\/p>\n

Bill, who’s a longtime musician and a member of Ukuleles of Paradise, was there with his Fluke and even took a bit of a solo on one song (the other players noticeably “lightened” their volume as we all played background so the Fluke could be heard) and I was invited to do the same but declined, at least this time.<\/p>\n

Perhaps I’ll bring a Hawaiian song to share next time! Any suggestions as to what songs I should select from?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Imagine a room full of musicians playing all sorts of old-timey, bluegrass and folk melodies. Yet amidst the expected mass of mandolins, gaggle of guitars, bunch of banjos and fistful of fiddles there are—not one, but—two ukuleles!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":706,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,4,1,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-learning","category-performers","category-personal","category-ukuleles-of-paradise"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/09\/folk_jam2.jpg?fit=960%2C640","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Wqkt-I","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":709,"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions\/709"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ukuleletonya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}