In Appreciation of Jonathan Lay's Trailjams Site

I've dedicated the past 12 months to reacquainting myself with Irish session tunes, with the goal of being able to participate in sessions, and a big part of that has been Portland, Oregon musician Jonathan Lay's TrailJams.org site.

There are now over 150 tunes on the site with both the notation and the audio at different speeds. All the tune types are represented: reels, jigs, hornpipes, polkas, slides, slip jigs, and more. The audio is very clean and clear and exactly matches the score, which ironically I think is great for ear training and ridding yourself of tab dependency. 

You can try playing the tune by ear based on the audio and then compare your version to the sheet music. It's like having a cheat sheet. In addition, there are links to recordings and other resources for each tune. The idea is not to simply learn the basic Trailjams version and stop there, but to use these bare bones versions as a stage in your learning toward building your own interpretations and variations.

I also like that he does a Tune of the Week, with the Tune of the Week being part of a Featured Set where it is either the first, second or third tune in a medley. At any given time, TrailJams has 10 of these featured sets. About every third week one of the sets comes off the featured list, while a new one comes on. At that rate, every six months or so there's a completely new group of 10 featured sets, with it taking about 25 to 30 weeks for any one set to go from new to old and then rotate out. If you've been keeping track, by the time a set drops off it should, hopefully, be in your long-term memory. The old sets remain available on a master list even after rotating out of featured status.

If you are fortunate enough to be able to participate in-person at one of the sessions Jonathan hosts in the Portland metro area, then the work you put into learning any of the featured sets (or individual tunes within the featured sets) will pay off because there's a strongish likelihood of these being played. There's no hard and fast rule about that, but the idea is for the featured sets to be in heavier rotation than others. The repetition helps with learning. At the in-person session tunes and sets are not drawn exclusively from the TrailJams list, but it forms the basis for the repertoire. Often, the reason that a tune makes it onto the site in the first place is because it was already being played a lot and therefore earned the TrailJams treatment. Other times, more obscure tunes are brought in that are new to a lot of us.

Some naysayers might think that having predetermined sets takes aways some of the spontaneity that is inherent in an Irish session, the not knowing what tune is coming next part of the experience. There's some truth to that, but Jonathan's approach is arguably more welcoming to intermediate level trad musicians who might be intimidated by a more fly by the seat of the pants approach.

Trailjams.org is completely free, although for a small monthly fee as low as $6, Jonathan offers a Patreon > Soundslice version which allows you to slow down or increase the speed of a tune, loop sections, hide the notation or change it to mandolin tab, play along with a backing track, and more. You can even transpose the audio playback to other keys/modes. Only minutes ago, I used this feature to move Lilting Banshee over to G-dorian instead of A-dorian to see if I could play it that way. What a great brain teaser! 

All in all, TrailJams.org is quite a service to anyone interested in learning Irish session tunes! Just imagine the amount of work Jonathan has put into this. Not long ago you would have had to purchase Irish tune books with play along CDs to have both the audio track and the matching notation. Here it is now, all in one place online. Bravo!

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