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JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
A good jam session is all about the vibes, musicians feeding off each other to take their music in new directions. This week, a group in Michigan tried pushing the form to its limits in their bid for the longest-ever jam session. Sophia Saliby of member station WKAR has more.
SOPHIA SALIBY, BYLINE: The world record attempt started Monday at 10 a.m. with six musicians on stage at a restaurant in Lansing, Michigan. Jeff Boog helped organize the jam.
JEFF BOOG: We are doing a continuous musical collaboration for three days without doing what humans normally do, which is to stop and take a break, change the subject, go do something else.
SALIBY: There's no official Guinness World Record for longest jam. So Boog and his friends settled on going beyond the longest nonstop improvised music session they could find - 57 hours played in Spain in 2024. But they weren't going to do it alone. So they recruited more than 100 other musicians, from professionals to amateurs to anyone who just wanted to play, to swap out in shifts for the marathon jam. One of them was singer and guitar player Mary McGuire.
MARY MCGUIRE: I think I just played with three different drummers, probably seven or eight guitar players, two different bass players.
SALIBY: Another participant, Zachary Mead, says collaborating like this isn't as hard as you might think.
ZACHARY MEAD: People that play music, they kind of just - they figure it out. They start playing and then they figure it out.
SALIBY: The group crossed the 57-hour mark Wednesday night, breaking the record set in Spain.
UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: Two, one.
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SALIBY: But the music didn't stop just yet. Three hours later at 10 p.m. and after 60 straight hours of playing, the musicians finally put down their instruments. Organizers say they plan to submit their performance to Guinness with hopes that it will be officially recognized and that they're ready to come back if anyone else decides to jam out longer. For NPR News, I'm Sophia Saliby in Lansing.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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