E-Mail This Article to a Friend Roomfuls of tunes JamSpot, plus new music from Greg Piccolo and Ron Levy BY TED DROZDOWSKI

Practice space is a bitch for musicians. Often there’s a waiting list for the dirty, poorly insulated rooms in funky old industrial buildings that are typically available. These rectangular boxes of sheet rock and particle board commonly go for $500 a month and up. Maybe the toilets down the hall work, but you’d better stock your own soap and paper. And you’d better hope the shit ’n’ death–metal guys upstairs don’t practice the same night as your group, and that your band’s drummer can tune out the steady stream of double-kick-drum thumps vibrating the ceiling overhead if they do. And that your car will still have its windows and tape deck intact when you’re done practicing. Also, don’t forget to watch your gear as you load in and out. Some of your fellow renters have sticky fingers.

Granted, not all practice spaces are hellholes. And settling into this environment isn’t necessarily bad. If they can raise the monthly scratch, younger bands who are getting their collective chops together can benefit from having a place that’s their own clubhouse, where they can play and hang three to five nights a week. The stories about geeked-up neighbors and the tiny mysterious flies in the urinals will seem funny in a few years.

But for professional and semi-professional players who’ve attained a high skill level and have, let’s say, reached a certain age, having to stop a practice to drive to the nearby Dunkin’ Donuts to take a dump doesn’t hold much appeal. Neither does carrying a drum kit up three floors because a freight elevator doesn’t work.

Enter JamSpot, a new musician-run business near the Cambridge-Somerville line that sidesteps the pitfalls typically associated with band practice spaces. Located in a new brick-and-concrete one-story building with ample, safe parking just off Windsor Place near Inman Square, JamSpot offers a clutch of clean, new practice spaces decked out with amps, drum kits, PAs, and CD recorders all included in a by-the-hour rental rate. (See www.jamspot.com.) There’s also a large room with a stage in the no-alcohol, non-smoking JamSpot that has 16-track recording capability. And, of course, a clean bathroom with new plumbing, toilet paper, and soap.

Although JamSpot opens this Monday, February 16, it’s been going through what one of its founders, John Mazzone, describes as an "R&D phase." Dennis Brennan, Duke Levine, Bourbon Princess, Kevin Barry, Mercy Brothers, and the many other locally based performers involved in last month’s "Project Bread" benefit rehearsed in JamSpot’s big room before moving on to the Arlington Regent Theatre. And Buffalo Tom developed some of the new material they played at their recent Middle East gig in one of the smaller spaces. Comments from Buffalo Tom led Mazzone and his associates — who include drummer and booking agent Billy Beard, sound engineer Steve Folsom, John Mazzone’s bassist brother Andrew, and drummer and builder Ed Mottau — to install small backfill monitors for drummers in each of JamSpot’s rooms.

Beard is well known on the Boston scene for his playing with Maybe Baby, the Family Jewels, Kris Delmhorst, and Patty Griffin and for booking the Lizard Lounge and Toad. Folsum was Melissa Etheridge’s engineer for 15 years. And Andrew Mazzone plays with Twinemen, Delmhorst, the Jewels, and plenty of other artists. But John Mazzone, an amateur guitarist, sparked the JamSpot concept.

"Years ago, I worked for IBM in Japan," he explains. "In [densely populated] Tokyo, you can’t be schlepping your drums or bass amp on the bus. This style of rehearsal space is the norm. We put a band together, and for six years I never lugged a piece of gear. It was great. So I saw this as a way for guys like myself, who don’t play professionally but want to get together and jam occasionally, to have a place to go and make music in a great, easy-to-use environment." And with current New Depression interest rates and the availability of cheap, high-quality office space, this is a great time to start a business — if you’ve got the nerve, the plan, and the product.

JamSpot’s team has all three. Beard sees the space, which is located in an industrial zone behind the RCN building, from a working artist’s perspective. "When I was on the road with Patty, she would write constantly on the bus, and we’d pull into a town and want to put her new songs on tape — and there would be nowhere to go. This is perfect for doing that. There’s parking, so you can pull up the bus. We’ve got the gear, so there’s no unloading. You can just walk in and work out a new tune and play it on stage that night.

"I’ve also played with a lot of singer-songwriters from out of town, and the standard mode is, I get a CD in the mail and am told, ‘The gig’s on Friday. Learn the songs and maybe we can slide a rehearsal in when I get to town.’ Usually the rehearsal doesn’t happen. When you get on stage, it’s always different than on an album. Now there’s a place available for that kind of situation."

Folsom, who’s spent some 25 years as a touring sound engineer, was looking to get off the road when he met John Mazzone and was drafted into JamSpot. Bringing his sound-design skills to bear, he developed a plan for the rooms that isolates them from vibrations with a layer of rubber and employs hung acoustic panels and sonically reflective wall mats to dampen volume leakage and keep the sound waves within from creating a torrent of noise. Loudness, of course, plays a factor in that. So he chose mostly smaller tube guitar amps (Fender DeVilles and the like, a Marshall head with a 4x10 cab for the big room), simple bass amps like SWR combos, and Yamaha drum kits — all not overpowering unless cranked. He also got easy-to-operate CD recorders and set up one-speaker PA systems to keep conflicting sound waves to a minimum. "I really wanted everything to be simple, basic, and of good quality, as well as consistent, so no matter what rooms repeat customers get, things will sound pretty much the same."

Consistency is important. For the long run, Mazzone has a vision of JamSpots all around the metropolitan area, and then, perhaps, the nation. "We chose a building like this, essentially a concrete box with a steel top, because there are plenty of them available all over the country. We designed the practice rooms so they can be dropped into these buildings. We want to follow the McDonald’s model, so that in the future if a musician knows and likes the Cambridge JamSpot, they’ll feel comfortable stopping at the Albuquerque JamSpot on tour as well." But Beard stresses his belief that JamSpot is providing a service to the local music community. "There’s nothing like this for people who don’t need to play three to five nights a week and shoulder a monthly rent. Plus, I have a 13-year-old daughter. She and her friends aspire to be in a band. I would certainly have no qualms about dropping them off here to play music. To have a place where anybody can come and share the experience of making music is a beautiful thing."

THE DURABLE RHODE ISLAND–BASED jump-blues band Roomful of Blues have spawned a host of solo performers over the years, starting with their founder, guitarist Duke Robillard. Like Robillard, reed player Greg Piccolo and keyboardist Ron Levy have followed especially eclectic career paths, veering from blues to jazz to rock and groove-oriented jams. In recent years, Levy has made something of a specialty of the latter, whereas Piccolo — who’s recently reunited with another former Roomful, guitarist Ronnie Earl, to contribute horns to some of Earl’s live shows and appear on four tracks on his next, June-scheduled CD — keeps moving through styles like a shapeshifter.

"If you ask me what kind of album I’d like to make right now, I’d probably give you a different answer than I would have just a few weeks ago," Piccolo points out. In fact, his evolutionary pattern was set almost from the first day he took the stage. He began playing rock, then met blues guru Robillard when he was in his teens and was converted. After Robillard left the band and his vocal replacements, Austin’s Lou Ann Barton and Washington State’s Curtis Salgado, finished their respective stints fronting Roomful, Piccolo stepped out of the horn section to command the lead microphone until he left in 1994. That was four years after his solo debut, Heavy Juice (Blacktop), and 25 years after he’d started with the little big band, which made six albums under its own name and recorded others with Stevie Ray Vaughan, Big Joe Turner, and Eddie Vinson during his tenure.

Piccolo’s fourth and most recent solo disc is 2001’s all-instrumental Homage (Emit Dog), a graceful tribute to his sax heroes from the 1940s, who include Red Prysock, Lester Young, Ben Webster, and Illinois Jacquet. Along the way, he also added guitar to his skills, and he can be heard on his previous two CDs bending strings in an economical, in-the-pocket style. "I’m playing better than I ever have, and musical ideas just come to me so easily, but I’m trying to figure out what I want to do. I don’t feel like I’ve gotten my best on a record yet, so maybe what I’m doing is getting myself to a place where I’m prepared to do that."

Earl, for one, thinks he’s ready. "Greg’s playing tenor like a genius right now, and his singing’s coming from a really soulful place," the guitarist says over the phone from his Groton home. "I’m honored for us to be able to play together again."

Piccolo has similar praise for Levy. "He played B-3 on my Greg Piccolo & Heavy Juice [a jazz ’n’ grooves disc cut for Fantasy in 1995], and he just delivers so much soul, it’s inspiring." That quality has also attracted other outstanding players to Levy, among them saxist Karl Denson and the pioneering cool-groove-jazz guitarist Melvin Sparks, who appear as part of his Wild Kingdom band on his mesmerizing new Finding My Way on Levtron.com, which is also the name of Levy’s on-line store. (Piccolo’s titles can be found via gregpiccolo.com.) "I’m pretty much the only player who started his career in blues for commercial reasons," Levy says, chuckling. "When I was in my teens, I was offered jobs by Albert King and B.B. King, and it flowed from there. Most people know me from Roomful or from the blues albums I’ve produced, but I’ve been playing groove music for 10 years now and have a different audience I’ve developed through that. The bottom line is, I play whatever’s in my heart."

Also in his spirit. Next up for Levy: an album exploring cantors’ music called Daven with the Chazzan, with Rabbi Asher Bronstein of the Chabad of Merrimack Valley in Andover and Rabbi Velvel Gurkow.