Jisu Sheen photo
SB Khi on bass.
You could hear the jam from the outside, a hint of something alive in the quiet, rainy night. Inside the doors at Neighborhood Music School on Saturday night, the whole room was bumping.
Warm lights reflected off the shiny metal of saxophones and drums. I felt like I had entered a time machine and found myself back at the State House’s last jam.
Saturday’s open-to-the-public, all-skill-levels community jam from New Haven cultural hub Seeing Sounds brought together local legends and young students to make something funky together.
Many of the musicians on stage were current students or graduates from Neighborhood Music School. Trey Moore, Seeing Sounds’ founder, took every chance he could to shout out people by name and give shine to the young talents in the room. “This is amazing, this is what the people need,” drummer Jonathan Small told me, noting how the draw of a good jam brought several students out of their shells for the night.
People kept getting up like they were being called, looking to something in the distance. It took me a minute to realize they were responding to the needs of the jam. Cozy with a large rug and nestled between two low risers where people walked, sat, and sang along, the performance area was like a conversation pit. And music was the conversation.
As the jam leaned into a tight motif, the ripples of its jazzy soul spread slowly across the faces of audience members and performers alike. One member of the crowd looked stressed at how smooth it was, like what is happening?
Jason Thomas on the cello caught the whiff early, looking around with wide eyes that seemed to say, “Listen!” Then it was BooDah, sitting in the center of the stage in his all-black outfit, who started pointing from one side to another. Jason Benjamin, musician and pastor at Greater Glory Ministries in Hamden, held it together on the drums, driving the engine of the motif’s percussive elements. “This is my outlet,” he said. “I got my pastoral duties, my shepherding,” but he uses nights like these to remind himself he was a musician first.
The pattern started with a five-note melody from the brass, strings, and keys, all playing in unison to almost-overwhelming effect, then floated for a quick second before landing hard on two quick beats from the drum section. The musicians repeated this pattern over and over until every member of the crowd was singing along, pointing from one side to another, and jumping to the rhythm.
After, echoes of the motif stayed on the lips of people mindlessly humming, the melody stuck in their heads as they moved around the room. Guitarists lounging in the crowd half-playing their instruments also played along to the memory, the six-string version of a gentle hum.
When it came to that melody, or any of the night’s spells, the question of “who started it?” was moot. The musicians didn’t so much engineer any given idea as notice one, or discover one, and nurture it until the moment passed and it was gone. They didn’t dwell too hard on what just happened, even if it was incredible. They stayed present to catch the yet-unknown idea that would materialize next.
By the end of the night, photographer Chioma Nwana had put down her camera to belt gorgeous vocals for the second-to-last song, and Justin Esmer, who had been hopping from guitar to drums all evening, finally took the mic to surprise the crowd with a heartfelt ballad.
Local artist Ethereal Empress gazed at the musicians from her spot by the back wall, calling the night “lovely” and “very spiritual.”
“I feel it vibrating in my body, and I just want to move.”
Seeing Sounds holds an annual summer music festival in New Haven. This year, they will also hold a block party on Orange Street on July 12.