Jam Rock – A Religious Experience

“Revelations” serve as a mini essay / blog that may be converted to a Podcast Episode and or published to print.  Written by Magico777 * Copyright 2022

Welcome to Revelations on Jam Rock a religious experience.

What is the most powerful piece of music with no sung or spoken words that you have ever listened to and why is it powerful in your opinion?

While this question is subjective and there is no right answer, it is a question that when asked in a focus group, some people would mull over the question, submit a song but then could not substantially back up why it is powerful.

Other people in the focus group quickly shot off Rap songs, R&B songs, pops songs, country songs, folk songs, southern rock songs and then had to be reminded that the question specified no sung words.  Back to the think tank those people went…

With electronic music such as Trance, House, Techno and EDM, some people focused to pick digital music off a track from a DJ or producer that was released in a compilation of music that would register 30 minutes or more as their choice for most powerful music they have ever heard.  

The people who picked the digital tracks from compilations within the focus group understood that powerful music derived of beats and instruments shape and build a roller coaster of sorts, whereby the passengers of these roller coasters are our true, raw, inner emotions as a listener.  Fear, joy, anxiety, love, pain, tension, confusion, and solace are all found on the roller coaster and experienced by listeners. Many experience the emotional roller coaster ride while dancing for hours on end to the digital music run by DJs/Producers at multi day festivals such as Coachella.

These types of songs have become ever so popular in places such as Goa, India, The Burning Man festival, and the monthly Full Moon Festival that reoccurs every month in Thailand.  The center point of Trance, House, Techno, Dubstep, and EDM can easily be adopted surrounding social festivals that encourage, and inspire art, culture and spirituality.

However, prior to the birth of digital music, Jam Rock also known as Psychedelic Rock and or Groove Rock served as the master blue print of composing very powerful pieces of music as musicians worked together to act and react to each other through unrehearsed, and unscripted, unstructured improvisation.

The improvisation of Rock, Blues, and Jazz musicians backed by lead guitar players who are deemed as ultra-exceptional have historically shaped improvisation into a different kind of experience for music lovers worldwide because of the fact that songs played broke away from the structure of a song and into space.

Phish, The Grateful Dead, Wide Spread Panic, Jimi Hendrix and The Allman Brothers Band are a few rock acts that created a religious experience for their audience and kept them not only coming back for more and craving it but also made the experience infectious. 

The musicianship of bands that are able to improvise while hypnotizing their audience is not an easy feat to accomplish by any means but the ones that can pull it off typically are the antithesis of Pop Music and do not follow that same creed as other genres such as Country, Folk, Pop, and R&B music.  The religious experience comes from witnessing the action and counter reaction of each musician on a stage who is leveraging years to decades of music theory knowledge while texturizing live instrumental jams with various effects. 

The end result is mystification.  Fast forward to modern times and the same variables of the mix are being used in EDM and digital music with the one exception – Digital Music Producers, DJs and Artificial Intelligence Derived Music can never add the textures of raw, inner, emotion that a group of musicians are able to achieve because what the musicians are doing is leasing their audience their souls and selling that raw, inner emotion while pulling the audience in with them to be one collective unit.

To watch The Allman Brothers Band would melt your mind to the point where the band and audience became one body that can hear each person’s heart beating between the entire audience and band in unison –and in synchronicity – we all became 1 body.  It was just that magical.”

– Grace Slick, lead singer, Jefferson Airplane

The secret to such a magical experience (similar to what Grace Slick described) is derived from the voice of the electric guitar when it is played by a guitar necromancer.  A guitar necromancer is a ‘Top Gun’, the elite of the elite and the best of the best of guitar players who plays guitar not based on time and structure but more so sense and soul.   The music played in real time by these guitar necromancers feed the entire band with ethereal energy that can never, ever be emulated by digital or artificial intelligence with the same output between the necromancer guitar player and his bandmates who feed off the guitar and counter react to it – musically.

Elite musicianship by an entire band of musicians along with improvisation in real time that garners intense depth of soul (more so than being technically mathematical in music) creates the “One Body” experience – truly a religious experience.