hey Marshie, dave matthews is not a jam band.

Music to make your bones jitter and your hips shake. Music to make your feet move and your head sway. Music to make your beard and mind grow. A jam band manages to deliver a sense of freedom to the crowd. Jam bands free lance and improv. all while staying with each other and feeding off each others experimental energy. In a jam bands set, you'll find peices of the core song they started with, blended for your delight with a variety of instrumental solo's and always amazing percussion. jam Bands can be appreciated not only by people on drugs, but also by people who just dig music and the phases it grows through. (trust me though it's better when your high as cheese) Bands include Phish, Grateful Dead, String Cheese Incident Widespread Panic, The Allman Brothers Band,Moe, The Big Wu and other music that hints towards these areas of music.

a band which likes to jam, also refers to the genre of music known as jambands.

A style of band that may or may not understand the concept of a song but seems to care less. All songs are improvised nonsense. Imagine if you will, the theme song from the TV program Seinfeld being played for two hours in a continuous loop with drum and guitar solos as "accompaniment". As opposed to jazz fusion. Which is actually the same but with horns. The fans participate by playing hacky sack and smoking marijuana. This helps to distract their brains from realizing how terrible the music is. Sometimes there is singing but the bands have no real opinions on anything so it doesn't much matter.

Fans defend this with the oft uttered cliche: "They are all trained musicians and have degrees and stuff." The same defense taken to an extreme would be analogous to going to a dentist for a cleaning and coming out with dentures.

Possible reasons for the popularity of these bands would be that their fans do a lot of shitty drugs such as is the case in the "techno" scene.

Jam is a type of music that involves all aspects and instruments of music being played for a continuing period of time. Each song is about 15 minutes, and these bands usually have the biggest and most-devoted fanbase. Unfortunately, many prople often use drugs at the concerts and ruin the fun for everyone.

Relatively crude all-encompassing term for a group of bands who are musically quite disparate. Current jam band successes include such unique groups as Phish (closer to being straight rock than anything), String Cheese Incident (electric-grass or "acid grass"), Yonder Mountain String Band (more traditional bluegrass), Umphrey's McGee (prog-rock and jazz influences), Widespread Panic (Southern-ish rock), Blues Traveler (blues and power rock), Medeski Martin and Wood (jazz), etc. The originators of the phenomenon were the Grateful Dead, and Dead successors such as the Other Ones, Ratdog, and Phil Lesh & Friends carry the mantle of the Dead legacy today. The term "jam band" is of course rooted in the fact that all of these bands "jam," or improvise for long periods of time during their shows. Other characteristics of "jam band" status include dedicated traveling fan bases, close rapport with such fans, long sets at shows, etc.

musical groups with a lyrical disposition towards preserves of all kinds.

monotony. total monotony.

n. fusion of the musical styles of folk, country, blues, jazz, and rock. Generally attributed to bands that play with great emotion and symbosis with their audiences.