A recent Wednesday night jam session. All photos © Eric Francis.
— WHITE RIVER JUNCTION, VT
Ever throw a birthday party so epic that your friends decided they wanted to do the whole thing over again the very next week…and then every week thereafter?
Jakob Breitbach did just that—and last week what is now known as the Wednesday night acoustic “jam session” at The Filling Station in downtown White River Junction rolled through its ninth anniversary with no signs of slackening.
What began as a one-off birthday bash for the “Fiddle Ninja” has become a cherished gathering for an ever evolving collection of two dozen or so professional and amateur musicians who love the chance to hang out together and play traditional music for a couple of hours in the midst of a noisy bar.
“Fiddle Ninja” Jakob Breitbach (center) leads the jams.
Breitbach, now a Wilder resident, had just moved from Seattle with his wife Jes Raymond, a Hartford native and fellow self-employed musician and artist, when he wandered into The Filling Station one evening in 2017 to put up posters for an event and “noticed the pool table.”
“I thought it was kind of good place to bring people together and shoot some pool and play some fiddle tunes on my birthday, but it snowed 18 inches on that day. So we punted and we did it the next week. And then it just kept happening,” Breitbach explained.
The Filling Station’s famously acerbic bartender Bobby Prior, who has spent 32 years serving drinks there (he describes the jam sessions as, “Nine years of the same nine songs”), helped nudge the gatherings from Mondays to Tuesdays in order not to compete with football. A hiatus during the pandemic bumped it to the middle of the week.
“We moved it to Wednesdays and its been roaring every since,” Breitbach said.
There was concern a year ago when the bar suddenly went up for sale that new owners might not welcome the events, which take up half the floor space each Wednesday evening, but former solar developer Jesse Pollard and former nonprofit executive Anna Guenther say that preserving the jam sessions was one of their reasons for buying the bar in the first place. (You can read all about that in Duncan Green’s story from last summer as Guenther and Pollard readied the bar to reopen.)
“Wednesday jam at The Filling Station is probably one of the main reasons I’m still in Vermont,” Pollard, who also heads up Hartford’s Energy Commission, said this week.
“When I first moved up here I had long hair and when you walk in places as a newbie, people would turn around and look and you step back outside…then I walked by here randomly on a Wednesday and the jam’s happening and it was crowded and it just had the complete opposite vibe. I became a regular at The Filling Station on Wednesdays almost exclusively,” Pollard recalled, adding that in a village that already has several upscale cocktail bars and a craft brewery down the street, patrons were quick to remind him: “This is the dive bar. You better be intentional and responsible with what you do with the dive bar.”
“We knew what the community wanted to see out of The Filling Station and that was in the forefront of our minds and hearts when we were in the process of acquiring it,” Pollard said. “They could have taken the jam anywhere they wanted, but I think the fact that they chose to keep going with The Filling Station was a massive endorsement from Jakob and the regulars that we were going in the right direction.”
The jammers themselves could hardly be a more eclectic or diverse group, ranging from classically trained Dartmouth students to professional musicians to dedicated amateurs like acoustic guitarist Matt Cardillo, a life-long postal worker who was memorialized at a jam earlier this month after he passed away following an illness.
“Matt Cardillo was one of the original jammers. He was here right from the beginning and this is where I got to know him,” Breitbach said.
One of the youngest attendees at last week’s session was trombone player Edwin Robledo of White River Junction, a biomedical engineer who specializes in optical design.
Robledo had played the tuba in middle school and high school and, following a nine-year hiatus from playing to complete his advanced degrees, he joined the Upper Valley Community Band after he moved to Vermont. “They let me borrow a trombone and I’ve just been going ever since,” he noted. “A girl at the pizza shop told me about the jam. I was so nervous about coming but it was always in the back of my head. Then in December I’m like, ‘I’m just going to do it!’”
“I showed up two months ago and now I’ve been doing it almost every Wednesday. It’s extremely welcoming and very fun. It feels low risk. I don’t feel too judged. I feel like I’ve just improved as a musician and opened myself to different genres that I don’t normally listen to, to be honest. I really love the environment and the atmosphere.”
Breitbach, who “grew up as fiddle player in a family of five fiddle players in Iowa,” says that having someone to lead the fiddle tunes is “enough of a centrifuge for people to play around” even if they aren’t used to playing with each other at first.
“Folk music welcomes the common man so you don’t need to have electronic equipment,” Breitbach explained. “You’re singing songs from the folk medium that your mom and dad, your grandpa and grandma used to play. There’s almost always 20 musicians here or, as I like to say, there’s 20 people who bring instruments—some of them are musicians! You do need to have a bass player and we have three or four regular bass players.”
Last week that bass player was jazz enthusiast Madonna Gordon of Norwich. Gordon bet herself (successfully) on her 49th birthday that with a gift of lessons, she could learn to play bass by the time she was 50. “This is maybe my second or third time here, but I’ve played with multiple of these musicians other places. This is great to be part of. It’s just such fun,” she noted.
With a brace of harmonicas at the ready, one regular who has been coming every week for a couple of years now is retiree Will Adler of Quechee. A former chemist turned newspaper reporter back in New Orleans who once covered the 1972 Munich Olympics for UPI (Yes, that Olympics), Adler picked up a harmonica on a whim in his 20s at a government exchange store he’d wandered into with his girlfriend at the time.
“I play by ear,” Adler explained. “I’d walk around New Orleans and listen to the riverboat whistles playing tunes and try to learn.”
Adler goes to various jam sessions around the Upper Valley four to six times each week, but says the two he never misses are the ones held at Woodstock’s Ottauquechee Yacht Club and this one at The Filling Station. “This is the ultimate party here,” Adler said enthusiastically. “The Norwich Inn has the Hootenanny, which is real sweet with lots of talent too, but the audience sits quietly and listens. Here it’s a wild party. People will come in from all different worlds and they’ll chatter away at the bar, somebody strike up a tune, and, almost as if there’s a conductor, people will just join in like they’ve been playing together all their lives. It goes from chaos to cohesion in an instant and the music is beautiful.”
