Terri was raised in Waverly, New York, in the Southern Tier region, between Binghamton and Elmira; “a little speck between those two places,” she says. “My family operated a dairy farm and I grew up out in the woods.” She lived in Hopewell Junction for about ten years before moving to Saugerties in the ‘90s. Terri worked in the biomed field for 28 years, then seven years at a cancer research institute in Valhalla. Feeling the need for change, she took her present position in Cold Spring.
Steve was born and raised in New Jersey. He moved to New Haven to do biological research at Yale University. It was interesting work, he says, affording him the opportunity to work with a Nobel Laureate and leading to a year-long stint in Heidelberg, Germany. “I was one of only a few people in the world doing a particular procedure and they wanted me to train somebody in Germany to do the same thing,” Steve says.
When he came back to the U.S. a year later he worked at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City for five years and then for 24 years at the small research facility in Cold Spring where he eventually met Terri, who also worked there. Steve currently works for GlobalFoundries of Malta in quality control. “We look for defects using electron microscopes to evaluate new processes and potential issues with the technologies they’re developing,” he explains.
December marks the end of the tenth year that Terri and Steve have organized the John St. Jam events that take place at 7:30 p.m. on the second Saturday of each month. Jams are also held on the fifth Saturday of months that have a fifth Saturday (four per year). The fifth Saturday performances have a theme, either in the music (songs with girls’ names in the title) or in the musicians (a recent night featured performances by four pairs of siblings). Admission is $5, available at the door, with all of the proceeds going to the church—a generous monthly fundraiser although Terri modestly declines to mention for print the dollar amounts that have been donated. The musicians can sell their CDs and other merchandise if they wish, keeping all of their profits, and home-baked goods, coffee and bottled water are available for the audience to purchase at nominal price. Terri works the door and Steve (or the “Jam Meister” as Terri calls him) works the sound board and acts as master-of-ceremonies.
Part of the tradition of the John St. Jam is the pre-show dinner that Terri and Steve have for the musicians at their house before each show. “We started out inviting the new people who hadn’t played the Jam before, but after a while we started inviting everyone who was playing,” says Terri. “It’s fun to sit here and talk and relax, and we wanted to give something back to the musicians.” The couple say that the camaraderie fostered by the dinners shows up in the Jams afterward. “It happens on stage not by accident but because the people are comfortable with each other,” Steve says. “The musicians may never have met before but they feel connected to one another because they’ve just spent a couple of hours having dinner together and talking. Sometimes they’ll go into a corner with a guitar and work on a harmony or solo. It’s fun for us to throw these people together and then see what comes out at the show.”
Sometimes spouses or guests come, too, but Terri says a group of up to 14 still fits comfortably around the table. If it gets bigger than that they’ll do a buffet, occasionally inviting the people who help with the Jam or regulars, “to give them a chance to be a part of the whole thing,” she says, “not just the performance but the conversations and connections that are made over dinner.”
The musicians aren’t compensated financially for their performances at a Jam, but there’s no shortage of interest from them in playing. In fact, the Massardos have had to instigate a rule that they only take four new performers a month because most of the musicians who play want to come back and do it again. Right now the Jam is booked out into next spring, says Steve. “The single biggest reason they want to play a Jam is because of the level of attentiveness from the audience,” Steve says. “The people are really listening and engaged in everybody’s performance. It’s not like playing at a bar, where you’re competing with the baseball game on TV or billiards—which is not only distracting as a performer, but disheartening. They come here and they have 100 or so people who are just fascinated by what they do. And a musician wants to be heard; they’re putting their heart and soul into writing these songs.”
Between choosing the acts and booking them along with all of the coordinating details that come with it (not to mention hosting the pre-show dinner), the Jams are a lot of work to put together. Do the Massardos ever think they’ll stop?
“We’ve said from the beginning that we’re just going to ride the wave as long as it lasts,” says Terri. Steve says that the shows have become so “organic” now that “we almost feel like it’s an entity in itself and we’re sort of the curators. It’s like it’s bigger than us now and we just don’t want to screw it up.” The shows do take up a lot of what would be their free time, however, and since their current work schedules keep them apart for part of each week, they miss the togetherness they had more back when they both commuted and worked together every day, says Steve. On occasion they’ve drawn in friends to make the Jam happen when they needed to take a night off, so if they ever decided to completely stop, Steve says, they would first find out if anyone would be interested in taking the Jam over or taking turns doing it for a while.
For now, though, Terri says, “we don’t want to let our audience down. And this is our release—our sanctuary where we go to get away from everything. Sometimes, every now and then, we get one of those beautiful moments [in the shows] where it’s so intense, it literally makes you cry. That’s what makes it all worthwhile. Those moments, it’s the community, the music community feel, and our audience is part of that community now.”
The next John St. Jam will be Saturday, Oct. 12. For more info, visit www.johnstreetjam.net.
