Jam band

A jam band is a musical group whose concerts and live albums substantially feature improvisational "jamming". Typically, jam bands will play variations of pre-existing songs, extending them to improvise over chord patterns or rhythmic grooves. Jam bands are known for having a very fluid structure, playing long sets of music which often cross genre boundaries, varying their nightly setlists, and segueing from one song into another without a break. Originally emerging from the psychedelic rock movement of the 1960s, the style was pioneered by acts such as the Grateful Dead, the Free Spirits, Love, the Yardbirds, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Mothers of Invention, Jefferson Airplane, Soft Machine, Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Pink Floyd and the Allman Brothers Band. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the style influenced a new wave of jam bands who toured the United States such as Phish, Blues Traveler, Widespread Panic, Dave Matthews Band, The String Cheese Incident, moe., and Col. Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit. The jam-band movement gained mainstream exposure in the US in the early 1990s with the rise of Phish and the Dave Matthews Band as major touring acts and the dissolution of the Grateful Dead following Jerry Garcia's death in 1995. Jam-band artists often perform a wide variety of genres. While the Grateful Dead is categorized as psychedelic rock, by the 1990s the term "jam band" was applied to acts that incorporated genres such as blues, country music, contemporary folk music, funk, progressive rock, world music, jazz fusion, Southern rock, alternative rock, acid jazz, bluegrass, folk rock and electronic music into their sound. Although the term has been used to describe cross-genre and improvisational artists, it retains an affinity to the fan cultures of the Grateful Dead or Phish. A feature of the jam-band scene...