Anchors Away: Disentangling Open Mics from Open Jams
What's the difference between an open mic and an open jam (when it comes to Music, NOT Comedy or Poetry). From this American's perspective (and I AM American), I use these words very specifically and in a particular way. Allow me to try and use a metaphor to point to this distinction I'm getting at but don’t be alarmed if your understanding falls short. I’m referencing things that may or may not fall outside of your usual everyday understanding and comprehension. But we’ll get back to that.
An open mic has multiple individual and separate-from-one-another ships, you could say, each working independently from any of the others and needing to navigate and be able to navigate between the two is paramount. There are signals you give one another, courtesies, that let you know where you are in relation to the others. They're coming in, they’re going out, such as in the case of a port where ships are constantly passing one another. You’ll want to know that no two ships are exactly the same.
An open jam, on a different level, is essentially one whole ship, throughout the entirety of the event, all in all as big or as small as you need it to be whose parts are all and each interchangeable and interlocking. If you need or want to put a new drummer in, the old one comes out or you can have now two drummers who, if you have enough equipment, operate separate equipment or the same equipment or different kinds of equipment such as one on drums and one on djembe. It’s very flexible in that way as it's only limited by what's available and what's in your imagination. Think the Theseus paradox as with Open Jams, you can replace drummers, guitarists, bassists, vocalists, basically anything you want as a unit (hive mind) to take out and throw in throughout the entirety of the affair.
With an open mic, your ship is your own, you captain it, and you might check in with lighthouses and their light shafts, the correct radio frequencies, inclement weather, and so on and so on, but the parts you go in with unless trying to get some repairs done, are the parts you intend on coming out with. Throughout the event, my ship, my crew, my set, are what they are when I’m on stage. Off stage, mixing and mingling is not what I’m referencing here although that’s also part of any good relations.
That said, to put it a tad bit more simply, both open mics and open jams each have their merit although in my experience, if you’ve ever served in the armed forces of your home country, open jams I would say are simply "training exercises" whereas open mics IMO are where you can actually get to "put rounds downrange." In the case that you are intent on getting good at this thing called music, neither do you really get to say no to … unless you really want to, you know? See you on the other side.
