What is “sitting in”? Sitting in is one of the best ways to network and start letting other players know who you are. If you do it enough and do it well, before you know it, you will be in the band that has the other players sitting in, or you could be asked to join an original project.

What does “listening” have to do with it? I was just on a gig the other night with musicians I have never played with before, and the subject came to me. I don’t hear it talked about very much, but it sure should be. Listening is one of the most important things you have to be able to do if you want to make music with other people. I know that sounds very obvious, but you may be surprised by how many players do not listen well. You have to be able to hear yourself and the others around you, so you can feed off of what they are doing and where the song is going. Music is a universal language, but if you only speak your own language, you will never fully be able to communicate.

Sitting in with a bunch of musicians you have never played with or met before can be daunting and a bit scary, especially at a jam session where you put your name on a list and wait to get called up. So many times in my life, I went to jam sessions like that to try and network and meet other players. A necessary evil in a musician’s life that we all have to go through, it is one of the best and worst ways to get your name out there, but it must be done because you can only practice in your room for so long. Unless, of course, you don’t care about making music with other people.

The reason that sitting in can be scary, bad, great, fun, and eye-opening is that as much as you think you are prepared and can handle anything, inevitably you get thrown in with either musicians who are not very good or you have to play a song that you have never heard before, is boring, or very hard. That’s how it goes most of the time. It’s luck of the draw, but you still have to put up with the bad to eventually get to the good, and the good can end up being really great! You just have to be patient, persistent, and prepared.

The Three Ps
Patience — good natured, tolerant of delay and incompetence
Persistent — never ceasing
Prepared — equipped with necessary intellectual resources, made ready beforehand
As you can tell from the meaning of each P, the three Ps can be used for anything in life not just music. You have to be patient when going to sit in. For example, when I was much younger and trying to make a name for myself in Los Angeles, I went every Monday night to the Baked Potato, a famous jazz club in LA where all the best musicians played. Monday was the “jam” night where the house band would play a set and then call up other players. For months, I went to that Monday night jam before I was ever called up; I think they made me wait just to see how persistent I was. Finally, my time came: It was at the end of the night, and the keyboard player, who was the bandleader, handed me a chart. It was a Weather Report song that I had never heard of before, and I could tell right away that it was all on purpose. They wanted to see if I could handle it. The keyboard player said, “Don’t worry, it’s easy. The only hard part is the ending,” and he wasn’t kidding. The song wasn’t very hard, but the ending went all over the place. The time signature changed, and there were stabs that were very syncopated. I thought I was a decent reader by that point in my life, but it challenged everything I had learned. I didn’t totally crash and burn, but I didn’t come out unscathed either. The ending section repeated four or five times. By the second time around, I started getting the stabs right, but at the very end, there was a unison figure that the whole band had to play together. I messed it up pretty bad and left that night feeling rather dejected. The guys in the band said that I sounded great and that it was okay that I didn’t play the ending right. I told them I had never heard that song before, and they just laughed. It was sort of a rite of passage, and it proved to me and those other musicians that I could hold my own. I was prepared to jump into the deep end and see if I could swim.

Being able to listen well along with the three Ps made it so that I could handle the situation. I was able to play the bulk of the song with feel and vibe, which put me in a good light with the other players. When the song got loud, I followed. When the bass player changed up his bass line, I tried to go with him. I listened to everything going on around me and was able to make it musical, which in the end, is the most important thing. Listening and the three Ps can really make a difference when sitting in.

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How-To Listen: Part 1 – Sitting In

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