What makes a good jam session? Maybe it’s the combination of instruments or the vibe of the music.
For a group of Michigan musicians this week, they cared less about the quality and more about how long they could play for what they believe is a record-breaking jam session.
The world record attempt started Monday at 10 a.m. with six musicians on stage at UrbanBeat in Old Town Lansing, Michigan. Jeff Boog helped organize the jam.
"We are doing a continuous musical collaboration for three days without doing what humans normally do, which is to stop and take a break, change the subject, go do something else," he said.
There's no official Guinness World Record for longest jam, so Boog and his friends settled on going beyond the longest nonstop improvised music session they could find: 57 hours played in Spain in 2024.
They set a few rules for themselves to make the challenge more structured: like having at least three musicians on stage at all times, keeping everything improvised with no planning ahead of time and, most importantly, the music never stopping.
But they weren’t going to do it alone, so they recruited more than a hundred other musicians, from professionals to amateurs to anyone who just wanted to play, to swap out in shifts for the marathon jam. There were guitars, clarinets, bongos and a tuba on stage at various points among other instruments.
By 7 p.m. on Tuesday, more than halfway through the jam, dozens of musicians had taken the stage, many of them meeting for the first time. One of them was singer and guitar player Mary McGuire.
"I think I just played with three different drummers, probably seven or eight guitar players, two different bass players," she said. "The piano player was great, and then a woman jumped up and was singing harmonies."
Another participant, Zachary Mead said collaborating like this isn’t as hard as you might think
"People that play music, they kind of just they figure it out," Mead said. "They start playing and then they figure it out."
With no way to really know how the jam would go before they started, organizer John K. Addis was happy to see how everyone had come together.
"They are jamming constantly. There are no covers, no pauses, and somehow it's all working," Addis said. "I don't think we've had a pause more than like five seconds."
The group crossed the 57 hour mark with a countdown Wednesday night, breaking the record set in Spain, but the music didn't stop just yet.
3 hours later at 10 p.m. and after 60 straight hours of playing, the musicians finally put down their instruments.
UrbanBeat owner Terry Terry, who had hopped on stage a few times throughout the jam to play flute and percussion, made this declaration:
"We set out to prove that Lansing is the music capital of Michigan, and I think we're now the jam capital of the world," Terry said.
Organizers say they plan to submit their performance to Guinness with hopes that it will be officially recognized, and that they’re ready to come back if anyone else decides to jam out longer.
Additionally, the jam has inspired new ideas for the Lansing music scene including creating more dedicated nights for musicians who've never met to collaborate together.
