Sometimes events aren’t so much a occasion as a occurrence or a thing. Westman Jams holds musical events here and there, all over the South-Western portion of our Provence and sometimes even farther afield. Have you ever considered the things that we have to do to make this possible? Of course it requires funds. That’s always a challenge for a non-profit group such as us but often it gets down to basic stuff. Things like microphones and sound equipment, donated by one member of the group or a venue to preform in donated by a local group or community. These are obvious, we see them at every jam and recognize the importance that they play in holding the gathering. Often, however, it’s the smaller things that are just as critical in order to allow us to do the things we want to accomplish. These things are often donated by members, completely at their own expense and often with a lot of volunteered labor, so that we can be as flexible and successful with our jams as we have been up to this point.
Here, on this page, I’m going to draw your attention to various events where we acquired many of the useful props and equipment that we use at most every jam and highlight the fact that it was the generosity of many different members of the jam, and community organizations that allowed us to have these valuable tools that we use to promote and operate our jams.
let’s give a cheer for all those folks who have supported the jams, here and across the country, because with out their help, financially, with their volunteer labor, and donations of critical equipment, we just couldn’t be around today. I can’t possibly show every thing we have to be grateful for, but here are just a few things, big and small, that will hopefully get you thinking about how our jam functions.
Click on the photos below to see them in their full resolution.
In the early winter of 2007 the board of Westman Jams set aside a sizable portion of our meager income to purchase an old transport trailer from a moving company. It didn’t look like much and it clearly needed a lot of work to get it road worthy but the forward looking thinkers of the board saw the value of such a piece of equipment.
Now what, you might ask, does an organization that holds jams in a community center need a transport trailer for? Well Westman Jams has a lot of musical equipment that we use at every show. Microphones and stands, cables, speakers and mixing equipment and so-on. We can’t just keep this equipment at the community hall, and storing and transporting it in the back of a half-ton truck is problematic, to say the least. Besides we had already determined, at this time, that we were going to hold remotes jams in various different towns. Most these places don’t have the sound equipment to put on this kind of event, so we needed to bring our stuff with us. Thus it seemed essential to have a trailer to store and move this stuff in.
Serious financial donations were required to purchase the trailer and then it would have to be repaired and brought up to provincial highway standards, that would require serious volunteer hours of labor. Westman Jams members where up to the task, as the following photos will show.
Now she may not be pretty but she’s legal and she gets the job done. GREAT JOB GUYS!
Also in 2007 Bill Humberstone donated a sandwich board sign which we use to help guide folks to the location of our jams. This may seem to be a small thing, but tools like this help us draw folks to our events, and you will see it used at most every jam we hold. Once again, one of our members saw a way to help the jam and volunteered the time and material to make it happen. Thanks Bill! We really appreciate what you do for us!
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Westman Jams 