BANJO AFTER DARK
A Weekly Performance & Jam held on Thursdays. 7PM Performance, 8PM Jam.
Location: Borelli’s Pizza 2124 West Lawrence Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60625
Host: Jonas Friddle
Features: American Roots Music – inclusive of blues, bluegrass, old-time, song circle jam
Description: A performance set opens the evening from 7-8PM and then area pickers gather for a circle jam from 8PM on. There is a list of tunes that the first 6-7 songs are called from, and then participants are welcome to call out tunes.
Travel & Accessibility: Accessible by public transit, Lawrence (81) CTA bus, between Damen and Western Brown line stations. Street parking on Lawrence or neighborhood streets. Wheelchair accessible, no stairs.
For More Information: Banjo After Dark Webpage, Banjo After Dark Instagram
Q&A with Jonas Friddle, host of Banjo After Dark
Cassie Wright, Bluegrass Chicago: Tell us a little about Banjo After Dark and how this jam got started?
Jonas: The first jam I went to when I moved to Chicago was at the Grafton and that was hosted by Mark Dvorak. There were a couple of jams hosted there, so I was going to the Grafton pretty regularly. After a while, I asked the owner Malcolm if I could lead an old-time jam one night of the month, and a jug band blues jam on another night of the month. I was doing that a bit, until the pandemic lockdown happened.
On jam nights during the pandemic, I started doing a little video in my room, making a cocktail and playing a banjo tune. So I’d then put the recipe for a cocktail up, and maybe people were joining me in making the cocktail, maybe playing banjo.
When the lockdown lifted, the Grafton didn’t open back up. So I started looking for a place to do jams again, particularly with outdoor space and Borelli’s has a rooftop, so we were able to come here. At that point, I stopped making the distinction about ‘what I was going to do’ (genre-wise). So that fit a lot of key points at the time – it was outdoors, open to multiple genres, and overall people were looking for something to bounce back to, as a lot of other places were still closed down.
A lot of people started coming regularly, and when it got big, we needed to figure out a way to get everyone on the same page, so it wasn’t too unwieldy, so people weren’t screaming out the names of songs that nobody knew. So I put the top 100 tunes that are the core repertoire and then slowly started to create instructional content for those tunes, every couple of weeks I can get something up.
When the jam starts the first six or seven tunes are part of that list and have instructions. So when people come, they know that for the first 30 minutes they can know every song, and then after that people are welcome to call whatever they want, but often they will still call tunes from the list.
For the performance element, I was doing one night of the week at the Grafton that was performers, in addition to those jams. So this is truly blending all three nights I did at the Grafton into one. About 50% of the time the people performing are people who are already attending the jam anyway, so they’ve gotten comfortable in the space, they’ve met friends through the jam, and you get to know your jam buddy by hearing them perform.
BC: How did you develop the jam and its format – were these choices intentional? or did they develop organically over time?
Jonas: The format was intentional. I don’t stick to one genre in my other musical life, so it was intentional and a little selfish to not do ‘just an old-time’ night or ‘an irish night’, we’re playing a variety of genres and tunes, so that was intentional to make sure equal amounts of stuff gets called for all people.
The performance stuff took a little time to gain speed. For the first year, I was filling in every other week or trying to round somebody up on the other weeks, but now the schedule has filled out for months at this point. (Banjo After Dark, full schedule here)
BC: How do you describe Banjo After Dark to people? What have you made here? Have you made a jam? Have you made a community? Because to me, it’s almost like its own ecosystem.
Jonas: You know, ecosystem has been a word that has been used before. Because the core of this happens at the White Oak Festival, and bands have formed out of these jams. I wonder, like when you see the documentaries about Greenwich village, I wonder if this was like what it was like. Because even in the middle of all this you’ll still have Mark coming out and yelling a pizza order, but at the same time, people still listen to the performers really intently. And the arena is full every week, starting at the performance prior to the jam.
BC: What about you? What’s on the horizon for you – your teaching, your playing?
Jonas: I just put a record out, When the Water was the Sky, and so that’s done and I wrapped up most of the performances that are associated with that.
My biggest focus is on things that are going on with White Oak Festival. The festival takes place in August 8-10, 2025. And one of the things that is so cool, one of our community members here is an astronomy professor. Dr. Luke Leisman. He has an informal astronomy lecture series here called ‘Astro After Dark’ and we’ve done two collaborations called ‘Banjo Astro After Dark’ where he gives one of his talks targeted towards people that don’t know much (like me) and then I select songwriters from the community and they get the topic ahead of time and they write songs. Its interspersed like 5 min of lecture, a little song, through the night. People love it, I love it! So we just did our second one of those and we’ll be doing versions of those up at White Oak this summer because we can actually see the stars there!
I’m also putting together an educational White Oak Roots Weekend July 18-20, 2025. Which is going to be workshops, performances and lectures. We have the professor of Ethnomusicology from Brandeis coming, and a Sengalese couple from Milwaukee that are going to come and do African drumming and dancing, and much more.
BC: What do you enjoy about jams that is different from teaching individual students or a class?
Jonas: Jams and even the way this session works, I call it ‘social music’ for my students. Honestly for me, it helps me to help my students express what their goal is for actually learning to play. “Are you hoping to play with other people? Are you hoping to perform? Or to play socially? When you go to a jam, do people pass you over for a break when you wish you could take one? What do we do about that, how do we both learn a break and how to make eye contact? How do we make people aware of your presence? Do you want to lead songs but you never can find the right song for your register? How do we find out what your range is? How do you sing harmony? When is it appropriate to sing harmony when the song comes around?” All these good questions can come out of experiencing a jam. Once someone attends a jam, they can then better articulate “well, I really liked doing this thing, but this thing kinda sucked” you’re giving them something to react to. Where in a lesson you can be just pulling and learning songs from a book without getting to your goals. It’s been really essential for making the best use of lesson time.
BC: What’s the benefit of going to a jam? What would you tell someone who is hesitant about social music, or joining a jam, about why they should?
Jonas: Usually I try to express to people, if you are interested in this kind of music, specifically – for example, old recordings of anything from jug bands to the Carter Family to Jimmy Rogers – a lot of the sound that those people achieved came from being immersed in it on a regular basis. Most of them were immersed in this probably as children, so especially if you are coming to it later in life, we’re trying to recreate some of that experience of this music. This music is not ‘learn it, so you can go do it’ it’s ‘go get in the middle of it, so you can feel it.’ Go sit in it, even if you only know the G chord, go sit in the jam circle so you can feel the G chord, and when it happens. And then, you’ll add two chords and be able to play 50% of the songs. Going to a jam is essential in this kind of music to help people figure out what else they want to do.
BC: What’s a special moment from a Banjo After Dark session that will stick with you?
Jonas: There’s been a couple of times where someone has put together a performance part of the night and they’ve basically selected individuals from the jam to essentially be a guest star on every tune. You can tell that people are getting together outside of the jam to practice stuff because they met each other here, they are working on stuff to bring back and that’s really touching. You’ve been around for the holiday jam, there are easily 60-80 people in this tiny space. On any given week, it’s often 20-40 here and sometimes even 60. And a mega-jam is not conducive to this music. So the size can have its challenges, but the sheer amount of sound and people is pretty powerful.