--the quality of listening. how you don't know what you're playing yourself because your ears are on whoever else you're aligning with. how this is a learned skill and inimical to ego (at least in the rhythm section)

--unpredictability. will the night be busy or slack? will it be about horns, old hands effortlessly fluent, spinning improv Gabrieli off the tops of their heads? or is it a guitar army night, 5 guys building mazes with super stock Strats? one drummer, three drummers, or no drummers? rappers, screamers, storytellers, masturbators? you can't prepare for all the possibilities so your only preparedness is for yourself: leave the house in a mood and then bend that to suit all the other moods in the space

--We kept the riffraff out and built our clique on new chords (Kenny Clarke). it's not open mic night and why is that? jamming at Minton's in the early forties Monk and Klook and Bird suffered fools unhappily until they began playing changes no punters could follow, music that grew into bebop. no core group colludes at Eyedrum to create exclusionary music, but nonetheless there are few unfortunate performances, even from the inexperienced or eccentric. the traditions of both the space and the more-or-less house musicians (the names that repeat from CD to CD) set the bar where it should be. if you aren't comfortable without restraints (or capable of performing sans rules or preset structure) you probably won't be comfortable listening to those who are and the sense of purpose evinced on stage will be strong enough to prevent any coups in the name of order. you don't like it, you leave, the ones who stay tend to rise to each other's levels, when they don't those who collect these discs have the advantage of editorial hindsight (performances considered unfortunate are excised. these discs are not documentary)

--i used to explain this music and my part in it as "free jazz," and understand it as genre music, in the same way that a hard bop group or a rock band at this point in history are revisitations, people observing rules and playing what's expected of them. but much of what I hear in these sessions belies that. Ayler and Ascension and euro-improv all echo here (along with everything else from musique concrète to Arthur Janov) but--and this saving grace is directly related to the harmonizing diversity of the players--the resultant music is not mere reversion to a lost ideal. what you have instead, at best, are conversations between various artists who have either outgrown their genres of origin or who come from way off in the margin and never fit a genre in the first place. you can call it improv or free improv (the latter's redundancy is for shading) but all that tells you is that there's nothing written down. in practice many unforeseen combinations bloom in each good night and none of them are more than ephemeral. it's what happens when genre is set aside. not necessarily the future, just the present, which is bound to be familiar and strange by turns

--astonishment, born of the discontinuity between how you feel and how you sound. nights when you swore you'd all risen to another brilliant level, and then the playback: plodding, sputtering, stammering. nights when you wished you'd had paper bags over your heads, so none of the few kibitzers could link you with the musical crimes you committed, and then the playback: flight, glorious invention, stuff you doubt that you really played ("who's that bass player?"), because it sounds too good to be you

--you can't get this anyplace else, in this town, that i know of. you can go other venues to jam but you'll need to toe some line or another: blues via Chicago, acoustic via Cambridge, jazz as per Crouch and Marsalis. the unit of measurement will most likely be the song, the accepted tools the instruments usually sold in music stores, the goal to entertain without distracting people from drinking. at Eyedrum improv you could land from Mars bearing plasma-fired tone generators and go to town onstage with a log drummer, a trombonist, and some other first-timer with a boxful of tape loops; no one would blink, everyone would adjust, imperturbable Jeff would keep rolling tape and afterwards you'd be asked to sign the legal pad to get your performer credit on the forthcoming CD. sooner or later this won't happen anymore, but for now, these are good days to be living where we live, and playing this music because we can