Replacing The 'Jam of the Week' Page

Hey All!  Before I start using this space for its planned purpose -- to share the very newest recordings of whatever has happened with my many fantastic musical friends and I most recently-- I thought perhaps I should acknowledge the amazing scope of musical experience that its predecessor page has hosted.   

The 'Jam of the Week' Modular Album Page came into being sometime in the mid-late 90's (perhaps '96?), on the website of my first extensively-improvising group, the 3-piece Jazz/Buttrock Fusion unit, "hEEnD".  Like the various composed projects that followed and continued to fill the page (the short-lived-but-fruitful 5-piece "Falling Down Time" and the two-piece "Neon Brown"), this group did at least as much improvising as regurgitation of written material at both rehearsals and shows.  We recorded most of it (leading to a serious VHS-tape storage problem) and even got around to editing down some of the more memorable sections.  In the early days, due to our limited storage space, we would put up a single hyper-edited 3 to 5 minute clip.  In later years, as our growing improvisation and engineering skills increased  the listenability of the raw-recordings, our output became unmanageably large, and our patience for editing waned in direct proportion to our increasing appreciation for 'the unvarnished jam', we began posting longer and longer clips.  

Even in the early years special guests would appear on these recordings from time to time, but eventually, Adrian and I (neon brown), began hosting twice-monthly shows at Mr. Spot's Chai House in Ballard (Neon Brown Presents:).  At these shows, we would play at least one set entirely improvised, joined by 1-3 invited special guests.  The free-formity has gone even further in past two years -- as Adrian has resettled in Portland -- with me continuing to host these shows in various acoustic, electric, and audience-interactive formats.  Different lineups every show.  All improvised for both sets.  Most of the time now, I'll just post the full show unedited, but sometimes I've done some more extreme editing and multitracking of material from these shows, and I'll usually post these too.  And things *continue* to evolve.  So for fans of the 'Jam of the Week' page, there should be lots more of the (un)same great material to be presented here as our musical adventures continue together.

I'm moving the page to a blog format mostly to enable my fellow musical travelers to add their own entries to the diary of our journey in the comments here (I can't believe I didn't realize that this needed to be done earlier!).  That means you!: musicians, listeners, etc...  Please use the comments to say a little something about *your* experience of the particular show/recording.  

And I'm reluctantly changing the name of the page from 'Jam of the Week' to 'FREELAB (Floating-Roster Ever-Evolving Live-Album Blog), to avoid confusion with the now very popular hip-hop 'Jam of the Week' page.  

Okay, that's it for now...  Check out the older recordings while they're still there at http://www.neonbrown.com/jotw.html and look for the new stuff to start arriving here soon! 

thanks for listening, 

-andrew