Every Tuesday evening in Bushwick, a group of musicians from around the city and beyond comes together to fill The People’s Garden on Broadway Avenue with music, as part of the “Open Soul Session.”
Technically, there are no songs played at the jam session, said Yentema Prothro, who started it during 2020’s quarantine — only “movements” built off of improvised riffs.
The band transforms after each movement as musicians switch out instruments and audience members hop in on the jam. Many songs feature singing, rapping and spoken word poetry flowing over electric guitar, bass, keyboards and drums. The sound and vibe of the session change each week as new people arrive, Prothro said.
“The idea of Open Soul Session is encouragement for people, artists – and even the audience – to open their souls to whatever is going to happen,” he said. “So, don’t come expecting a performance — come for the journey to the end product, whatever that is.
“The session is open to everyone.”
He added that musicians don’t need an artistic license either to participate: “You can be at any skill level,” he said. “There's no good and no bad; there's just the journey — that is what Soul Session is really all about.”
Alan Cadet, a session regular since the jam sessions started, calls it a “judgment-free zone.”
In the beginning, Prothro said he and a few others jammed using one “makeshift” speaker. Now, a multi-speaker system allows the musicians’ melodies to drift through the neighborhood and compete with the roar of the passing J and Z trains just behind them.
Musicians come from as far as New Jersey to jam. Women and children from the shelter across the street cook in the garden’s central gazebo and occasionally join the jam, with a backdrop of crawling vines, murals and the flags of the Latin American countries from which many Bushwick residents can trace their roots.
“Everybody is welcome to sit down and enjoy the music, enjoy the garden, and breathe in the flowers,” said Hernan Pagan, who rebuilt the Peoples’ Garden in 1995 from a few fruit trees protruding from an abandoned lot to the lush green space it is today.
He now proudly calls the space “the cultural center of Bushwick.”
Those who come for the jams this summer can walk the raised wooden pathways past blooming flowers, towering corn stalks and trees bursting with fresh peaches and figs.
The sessions run from 6:00pm to about 9:00pm, and will continue through the end of the fall, or, said Cadet, “until we have to stop playing because our fingers are too cold.”
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