Sometime in the late 1980's (no one really no for sure the exact date), the Feedbag, a local Bloomfield, NJ bar, started hosting an open jam for local area musicians. The jam was run on every Sunday nite and started around 9pm and lasted until 1am. The jam attracted some of the best local talent around and soon developed a following of serious up and comming musicians. Many local bands have been formed because of the musical relationships gained at the jam.
In the early 1990's, Gary Brown took over the jam. Gary, a local musician and DJ, has used to his experiance of knowing what musicians want to keep the jam successfully running over the years. Although the jam has been moved a few times over the years, it has spent most of it's years at the Feedbag (now called Hathaways) where most of the musicians prefered it to be.
What makes an open jam a good open jam? Gary believes that it should be about the musicians and not the people running it. Too often, the people running the jam want to play more than the musicians that came to play. This is typical of bands that host open jams around the area. Some jams want to be of a specific type of music, say acoustic, blues, deathmetal, or what ever the people running it think is cool. But music is more than that, it should be diverse and constantly changing. All musical tastes are welcome at the jam--blues, rock, acoustic, folk, metal, country, punk, etc. Even Christian bands are incouraged to come down.
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