Some of you may have been aware of, or participated in, the Slow Jam Fizz series of live Zoom jams that my wife Maxine Gerber and I hosted from February 2021 through April 2023. A couple of weeks ago on the Fiddle Hangout (I can't seem to find the post now), there was a discussion of the fine Tennessee fiddler Bob Townsend, to which I posted a reply linking to a Slow Jam Fizz session that my wife and I had presented featuring Bob Townsend and his friend Tim Higgins. For context for those interested, I also included the back story of Slow Jam Fizz.

One thread participant, Tony Elder, got pretty excited about discovering this tune-learning resource for the first time, and feeling that it should be more widely disseminated, reposted it (with my tacit permission) as a standalone post. It was well received, so I thought maybe I should do the same here on the BHO, so here it is for those who missed it the first time around or forgot about it:

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Back story: Having played for many years, neither my wife Maxine Gerber or I normally take part in slow jams, but in early 2021 Maxine had been learning some old-time fingerpicking on the banjo, and thought she'd look online (it being the middle of the pandemic) to see if there might be some type of online slow jam where she could practice without anyone else hearing her as she improved her fingerpicking skills and speed. She didn't find quite what she was looking for, so we decided to start such a thing ourselves - and it became our "pandemic project", which we named Slow Jam Fizz! Having both been around the old-time scene for many years, we know a large number of excellent musicians, so we put out an invitation to many of those friends to host a "slow-ish" Zoom session where people could play along and hear nobody but the hosts and themselves - essentially a "private" session with the hosts, where nobody could hear your mistakes and tuning, including the hosts. We also live-streamed the sessions to YouTube in real time, so that those who didn't have (or didn't like to use) the Zoom program could attend as well. This also made it easy to archive the sessions for later viewing or for revisiting, an added advantage being that you can slow down or speed up the archived video to suit your preference as you learn the tunes!

No money was involved except for the strong encouragement to tip the musicians generously, which was a great way to help them get through that time of no gigs!

Anyway, we eventually presented 43 Slow Jam Fizz sessions over more than two years before we called it quits, and almost all of those sessions are archived on a YouTube playlist hosted by the Berkeley Old-Time Music Convention (BOTMC), which can be found here:

Slow Jam Fizz Playlist

And here's a link to a little further explanation of the concept of Slow Jam Fizz, followed by the list of all of the sessions and the musicians who hosted them (but use the "Playlist" link above to find the actual links to each session):

Slow Jam Fizz home page

I think pretty much anybody here on the BHO will find some (many?) familiar names in the list, and find something to enjoy and to pick up many new tunes from. If you do, please consider tipping the musicians! The tipping information should be included in the description below the video. (But depending on your browser, you might have to scroll down a screen or so to find the tipping info, or even the title of the video, as occasionally the YouTube links seem to display the information oddly.) Also, since these videos are several years old, some of the tipping addresses may have changed; if so, please contact me here, and I'll try to obtain more current info!

Enjoy!

Edited by - BrendanD on 03/18/2026 05:30:03

Edited by - banjoboyd on 03/18/2026 16:18:30