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1. Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead is hands down the most popular jam band of all time. This American rock band brought improvisational psychedelic music to broad audiences. They had few radio hits, but their concerts drew huge crowds. This group started playing in Bay Area ensembles like Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions.
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.
The following is a list of notable jam bands, or bands on the jam-band circuit. Jam band performances often feature extended musical improvisation (" jams ") over rhythmic grooves and chord patterns , and long sets of music that cross genre boundaries.
Essential Jam Bands. Whether they're jamming on extended improvisational solos, combining unlikely genres, or playing songs backwards, jam bands make innovative, risky, and unclassifiable...
- Moe. The sudden end of the Grateful Dead left a lot of jam band fans without a group to follow around the country. This pushed Phish toward becoming a juggernaut of the road, but it also helped out smaller acts like Moe.
- Pink Floyd. We were initially unsure about counting Pink Floyd as a jam band. Their concerts from 1973 onward were fairly rehearsed, even if songs like "Dogs" and "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" ran for nearly 30 minutes.
- Umphrey’s McGee. Jam bands and prog groups have some of the most passionate fans in music. This six-piece from Indiana offers a perfect combination of the two genres, meaning they have a die-hard cult of supporters that allows them to play huge venues like Red Rocks even though most people have never heard of them.
- Gov’t Mule. If they ever get around to making a Jam Band Hall of Fame, Warren Haynes really deserves his own wing. The guitarist not only stepped into Duane Allman's Allman Brothers role in 1989, but in 2004 he essentially took on the Jerry role in the Dead.
Jam Bands Music Subgenre Overview | AllMusic. Pop/Rock • Rock & Roll/Roots. Jam Bands were frequently pegged as Grateful Dead or Allman Brothers copyists when they first emerged in the early '90s. There was some truth to that, since jam bands were influenced by these groups, but jam bands were hardly mere revivalists.
Jam band music is a blend of rock, jazz, folk, and blues. It's a cocktail of sounds that is as diverse as it is exciting. It's all about the groove, the rhythm, and the connection between the band and the audience. Fans of jam band music love the unpredictability and the sense of community.
