Jam

On an average Friday night growing up, you would find me in my basement with my brother making music. For a good 5 or 6 years, we basically locked ourselves in the basement jamming away, creating new songs every night and recording them on our Tascam 4-track cassette recorder. The end result was about 80 cassettes filled with jams, ideas and complete overdubbed songs. We would have friends over and begin with a bass line, or a guitar riff, or a drumbeat, or noise on the casio sampling keyboard, and then jam for about 5 hours straight. But time kind of changes things after a while. People grow up, and their time is called to other things. This past weekend, I experienced that old feeling of freedom in music.

Every Sunday at church, we have two services; one at 10am and one at 11:40pm. So after the 10am, there is about 40 minutes of down time. This past Sunday, I was going to head over to the main building because I didn't have breakfast yet but decided to hop on drums and bang a little bit. After a second, our bass player came up and started playing. Then, after another 30 seconds or so, my good buddy Mark came up on keyboard and vocals and we started jamming. We just started playing random stuff and fit it to each other. It probably lasted about 5 minutes. It was great. After we finished the "song", I got up and decided to go get food.

After taking about 2 steps into the hallway (and finding out that CC couldn't bring me food), I turned around to go back and jam some more. Our drummer had hopped on the drums so I just stepped over to the microphone. Mark started with a keyboard part, then the bass player did some weird sounds with his effects and the drummer filled in as well. I started doing repetitive "oh" chants and "ah" chants. The music would start small, get huge and loud, then back down. Mark would harmonize with me on chants and it was glorious. During the jam, I rediscovered that this is what moves me and how I truly worship God. I find music a beautiful creation from and toward God. For a while there, I had my eyes closed and was in a totally different world, beyond that room. Nope, no drugs were involved haha. But, I felt like I had once again discovered and experienced a beauty not too commonly seen by your average person - and it was because I took the time to look for it.

It was beauty. Music is a language I can understand. It may be something else for another person, but this is my soul's language.