When I moved to North Dakota, away from my friend Tom and the whole old man jam band (who I still miss dearly), I didn’t leave them behind. I took them with me in the form of knowledge and song. Two thousand miles later, I took to jamming with a young man named Michael, a student of mine with a devastating gift for all things string-related. Now he plays with a big-time Chicago-based bluegrass outfit, through which, though he likely doesn’t know it, he is continuing to scatter little bits of my old friends’ influences. The point is that the jam, unlike the performance, lives on, even when it
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