In certain vernacular music traditions, improvisational jamming relies on inclusive, participatory social interaction. I investigate the possibility of a classroom pedagogy that draws on the social and musical conventions of improvisational jams, showing how these practices can provide a model for inclusive and engaged learning. The college ensemble - familiar to many ethnomusicologists - is an evocative intersection between a traditional classroom and an out-in-the-world jam. Drawing on my experience teaching a bluegrass ensemble, I outline a particular set of strategies that foreground inclusivity, mutual listening, and student-driven learning - all urgent frontiers of college-level pedagogy. Improvisation lies at the center of this model: jams are spontaneous artistic co-creations that rely on intricate and sensitive contributions by participants from a range of backgrounds and abilities (Laušević 2007; Fox 2004; Turino 2008; Allen 2010; DeWitt 2008). Conventions such as trading and backing solos, turn-taking in naming and leading tunes, and celebrating both beginners and skilled players all point towards intersocial competence and attunement. A close examination of these practices can enhance our understanding of the actual mechanisms of effective inclusivity, lending inspiration for restructuring other (non-ensemble) college classes, in which students must feel a sense of belonging to flourish (e.g. Gummadam, Pittman, & Ioffe 2016; Pittman & Richmond 2008; Zumbrunn, McKim, Buhs, & Hawley 2014). Fortunately for music lovers, jamming can make us better teachers.

The bluegrass jam session, characterized by Turino (2008) as a space of "participatory" action where "anyone and everyone is welcome to perform" (p. 30), embodies an ethos of inclusivity. However, this notion of inclusivity often conceals layers of unseen exclusion needed to cultivate musical participation. The umbrella term “bluegrass jam” encompasses a variety of improvisatory jamming traditions, each representing unique sonic and social practices. While the musical conventions and etiquette (Kisliuk 1988) remain relatively constant across these traditions, factors such as location, driving distance, and average age and gender introduce variability, prompting us to reconsider participation as a dynamic phenomenon beyond a participatory/presentational binary. Drawing upon fifteen years of fiddling experience, I propose sub-categories of jam sessions—festival, neighborhood, stage, and private— and demonstrate how non-musical elements shape and define these spaces beyond etiquette and common practice. These factors also have sonic implications, such as dictating repertoire, style of improvisation, and alignment with tradition. I argue that non-musical variables, including exclusion, significantly shape the nature of participation, highlighting the many forms of inclusion within this category of “bluegrass jam session.” I write not about inclusion, but inclusions; participations, not participation.

The jam session is an important site for the making of bluegrass-related string band musics, maintained not only by elite production teams, but also by grassroots participants. Historical and ethnographic writing on bluegrass describes what jams accomplish (Rosenberg 2005; Bidgood 2017) but doesn’t address the changing, improvised nature of jams, including scale of participation, repertory used, and demographics of participants. The “Jam Project” is an emerging digital humanities effort that partners with jam participants, equipping them to collect quantitative and qualitative data about how they create improvisatory music in their diverse local communities. Through a device-based application, partner-researchers (users of the app) can record jam events, upload photos, and/or enter basic text data (song titles, notes about the demographics of participants--particularly in terms of race, gender, and age group, details about the jam site, reflections on the event, etc.). This data can then be held locally, made available to the music-making community, and submitted to an accessible repository for analysis by academic and lay researchers. This presentation draws on literatures of app-based “citizen science,” statistics about participation in bluegrass music, and preliminary results from pilot usage of Jam Project methodology to argue that this sort of community-engaged research tool can provide valuable and otherwise inaccessible data—and to consider the importance of including more kinds of people in the process of data collection, reflection, and writing about music.

Discussion