Multijam was a Fringe Festival project meant to bring together emerging multicultural musicians who would be working from pre-recorded rhythms in isolation then come together to jam on 30 June. Two weeks before the Multijam performance, most of the musicians who originally signed up backed out. Phil Eaton, the project coordinator then recruited other musicians to fill the gap. I was one of the replacement musicians; most of the others were not really emergent as they have been musos for a while and have been performing around Darwin (and elsewhere) for some time. I still claimed the "emergent" title because, even if I had been a muso before, I had not performed for a long time. Certainly, I have not jammed with other musicians for a long, long time.

Anyway, Multijam at this point was more about the jamming and the presentation of music from different cultures rather than about emerging musos.
We did not have much time to work on the rhythms (produced by Justin Moon) or to jam with each other before the public performance. The participating musos had three sessions before 30 June (on 25, 26, and 29 June) and we had new jammers up till the night before the show. What we came up with on 30 June was not strictly a jam as we worked out beforehand what we would be jamming before the show. There was still some improvisation during the show itself so there was still the element of jamming there, but I guess most of the jamming happened during the three sessions beforehand, where we tried things out before settling on what to do for the show (and even then we did not follow the "score" exactly on the night). Really good outcome still. Participants and those who watched were happy with the performance. I was happy just to be playing guitar publicly again.

The idea of multijamming is good, for the benefits of the jamming process as well as for the relative excellence of the public outcome. Andrish and I think we can do it outside of the Fringe context and probably a few times a year. We'll be looking at possibilities after the Fringe.