Customer Reviews

Jam Session

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
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Extraordinary improvising from O'Connor, Thile and the rest, but I'm a little surprised that nowhere is it mentioned that the five cuts with the quartet of MO, Thile, Sutton and House are the same performances issued 7 years ago on O'Connor's double disc "30 Year Retrospective." The four new tracks add up to 35 minutes, and they are as tasty as you'd expect.

The actual CD of this album doesn't appear to be available until July but the MP3 download is listed here so it must be ready! I received an advance of the Cd and have been playing it all day. With the exception of bass player Jon Burr, all the other musicians on this album are well known to the Folk/Jazz/Bluegrass community and are superstars in their own right. The common thread here is violinist/fiddler Mark O'Connor, on whose own label this album is released.

The nine tracks were recorded at four different "jam sessions" between 2000 and 2004. On five of them O'Connor is joined by Chris Thile (former Nickel Creek mandolin player extraordinaire), guitarist Bryan Sutton and bass player Byron House. For two other tracks jazz guitarist (with lightning speed fingers) Frank Vignola joins then and Burr replaces House on bass. The other two sessions feature just O'Connor and Vignola plus Burr. These are all "live jams:" and there's lots of fast playing here. There's time on every track for the musicians to stretch out and "Soft Gyrations: - which goes beyond the 12-minute mark builds to a crescendo with O'Connor and Thile playing off of each other. And, "In The Cluster Blues" - one of the seven tunes written or -co-written by O'Connor, - runs for over 15 minutes! Listen to Thile's mandolin runs at about the three-minute mark on this blues tune.

If you are familiar with any of the musicians on this album you need to hear it! This is - hands down - the best album I've played all week!

Steve Ramm
"Anything Phonographic"

This is a wonderful follow-up to O'Connor's "Thirty Year Retrospective" set, which also featured Sutton and Thile. As a non-musician but avid fan it would have seemed impossible to me for these musicians to just keep getting better, but they do. On the earlier recording I had the sense that O'Connor might have been holding back, or perhaps been a bit in awe of young guns Thile and Sutton, but he's absolutely on fire here, threatening to just run away with the show on several solos even though his companions are playing better than ever. Thrilling, goose-bump-inducing stuff from genius-level players.

I am a huge fan of Mark O'Connor. Like most of the things he produces, "Jam Session" is great. I would recommend it.

Are you a six string fan?
Are you a musician?
Is your heart strong enough?
Well, buy this CD and you'll thank me forever and it'll start a new mission for you searching own material of these faboulous session men

What an immense joy! One could talk about the extraordinary technical capabilities of O'Connor and each one of his colleagues, or one could talk about the way they can interact like maybe no one else in a jam session, or about the amazing mosaic of different rhythms they have effortlessly put together (I love especially Macedonia, that wonderful O'Connor/Sam Bush tune from the unparalleled Telluride Sessions CD)... but I listened again to the whole CD and just let me be carried away by the whole pure music, without intellectualising a tiny bit, and I simply soared!