Straight off the top: the Nottingham jam nights where musicians test their skills

I’m playing keys at Heatcoate Street’s Jam Café, in front of an audience, with a guitarist, bassist, vocalist, and drummer. It’s a nerve wracking scenario regardless, but three facts make the adrenaline flow particularly intensely: one, I’ve never met these other musicians, two, we’ve not planned to play anything, and three, someone is holding up a sign which tells us to play ‘square’. What does that mean? Who knows. Best let the subconscious mind take over.

This is but one of the musical curveballs regularly thrown out at Perkalater – a monthly jam session, which local jazz musician Joe Egan has facilitated for roughly three years now. Rising phoenix-like from a jazz jam called Bitches Be Brewin’, which in the late 2010s Joe co-ran at Jam Café, Perkalater’s first home was JT Soar. 

“There was a slightly different community of musicians around JT Soar,” Joe says. “They put a lot of punk stuff on – that DIY type of mentality. So I was able to connect with that community as well, which was great. They were super supportive.” A driving factor for starting up Perkalater was Joe’s research master's; he investigated how with his Christian faith he could best foster a sense of community through musical jams. 

After finishing that master’s, Joe brought Perkalater back to Jam Café – where he first learned to run these kinds of events. His vision for it has never been clearer. 

“One thing that came up in my research was traditions – traditions are important. A jazz jam has rules – and by attending and being part of that community you learn them. The gap I’m trying to fill with Perkalater is that the rules are such that anybody can engage, be part of it, and their contribution be valued, which is harder than it sounds.”

Perkalater removes what Joe calls a “high barrier of entry,” which often characterises traditional jazz jams. In its current form, a Perkalater jam starts out with the names of three musicians randomly picked (from a kettle, not a hat, of course). They get up to perform, the only rule being that they can’t say anything to each other. 

Later, performers are directed by cue cards which read ‘faster’, ‘slower’, ‘backwards’, and the like. It’s pretty exciting to both watch and be part of – a structure that effectively levels the playing field between skill levels. And if what’s being played “doesn’t sound good,” then that’s fine, Joe emphasises, because “everyone’s contribution is totally valid.”

Through its existence in UK music, jamming has often been a way of ‘levelling the musical playing field’. In the 1920s and 30s, Soho jazz clubs in London would host expert musicians from West End orchestras, dropping in late at night after work to unwind and improvise, with other musicians operating in a less formalised context than they were. That was how early jazz styles like Bebop emerged.

That improvisational ethos is today at the heart of most music genres. Whether we’re talking about guitar bands making stuff up in a rehearsal studio, or hip hop artists showcasing their skill with freestyles, for about as long as ‘popular’ music has existed, musicians have gotten together with zero plans and few rules other than to create, socialise, and see what happens. 

Parisa East leads seventeen-year-old Notts music promotion company Acoustickle. Jamming is pivotal to her work as both an artist and promoter: “When I go to a jam session I’m talent scouting at the same time, seeing whoever’s there and whether we’d gel together,” she says. “I go to stretch myself artistically – especially if you’re a vocalist, you really want to come up with something brand new, and that’s quite a test on the brain. I find it quite exciting and it’s a passion thing.”

And improvising is, of course, inherently social – one of the best ways, if you’re musically inclined, of meeting new people. That particular kind of magic drives Build Beats – an event intended as a networking opportunity for dance and hip hop adjacent musicians, which Parisa helps facilitate with promoter Oli Gibbons at Hockley venue Movers. 

At Build Beats, after producers showcase their work, the event ends with a jam, where, “any vocalist that wants to jump on a beat – grab the mic and jam – any musicians in the room, plug in your instruments, and let’s work together to create something,” says Parisa, “because we’re introducing artists – there’s unlimited potential with that.”

For Joe, seeing connections made at Perkalater is one of the most gratifying parts of leading the event. “Playing music together, it’s quite intimate and vulnerable,” he says. “Someone might have different politics to you, or a different worldview, but you’re going to play music together first, by which time you might have made a couple of jokes, musically, and built some kind of trust.”

“And knowing musicians, we’re often not the most socially capable,” Joe says, “But something like Perkalater allows someone to build those social connections in a gentle and facilitated way. You don’t have to chat to people, but you probably will once you’ve done a bit of playing, because it’s broken the ice and made that introduction.”

It’s easy to understate the impact that these kinds of events affect lives too. They’re very spur of the moment, after all, and require regular attendance by similar people to see their best possible success. Joe however has seen people undergo some impressive musical evolutions.

“There was one drummer who played at the first sessions at Jam Cafe – Bitches Be Brewin’. He went on and was kind of terrible, he must have been twelve or thirteen. But he went on to study drums, and that’s really cool – I value that.”

Midway through my experience of Perkalater, I watch as two drummers and one bassist are called up to play together – a combination which any musician knows is one of the most awkward. But they make it work. It sounds amazing. 

“It stops it from being personal,” Joe says, when I later mention that occurrence to him. “It helps people accept that there’s random chance involved, and they’re just going to engage with it as it falls. It helps people to think a bit more freely too – if you’re one of those two drummers, you have to let go of ‘showing what you can do’. It challenges the ego a bit,” – an experience we could all probably do with a bit of. 

It’s often spoken about nowadays how people tend to be a little less selfless or willing to connect with others, and getting up to play music on the spot is bound to strip that issue away, at least in part. 

Perkalater occurs on the first Thursday of every month at Jam Café. Build Beats occurs regularly at Movers.