the JAB
moving beyond recovery
By Jason Scales
photo by Karen Rettig
I
n July, a week before heading to The
Lexington Recording Company in
Lexington, KY, to record their first
album - three members of The JAB Band
(formerly the Jam Alker Band) huddled in
an air-conditioned northwest side office,
reviewing promotional photos and a social
media video on a flatscreen mounted on
the wall.
The photos showed the band, com-
prised of Alker (lead vocals/guitar), Tom
Stukel (drums), Ryan Herrick (guitar),
Terry Byrne (guitar/keys) and Alex Piazza
(bass) standing stoically against a back-
ground of urban decay that could have
been shot around the corner from their
nondescript rehearsal space near the Nagel
curve off the Kennedy. The video showed
Jam Alker talking about the upcoming stu-
dio time booked with producer Duane
Lundy: “[We are] looking forward to insu-
lating ourselves as a band and creating
great art.” The band liked what they saw in
photos and on video.
Later in the adjoining practice space,
ironically featuring a poster of Jimi
Hendrix toking on a joint, the band lis-
tened to demo versions of the songs they
planned to record with Lundy. Alker
described the song “Riot” as “a banger,”
and one particular lyric broke through the
bluesy, upbeat rock: “Hard to see the truth
when your mind is in the gutter.”
“Dank Mississippi,” the heaviest song
they’ve written according to Alker, was
further described as ”Southern metal” or
“blues metal” by Herrick. It was indeed a
head-banging and sludgy blues mix with
banjo highlights, and it fully demonstrated
the band's sound featured on the upcom-
ing album, “Consume,” Alker said.
The Orchard (a Sony-owned company)
has signed the band to a distribution deal
(under the boutique label Medicine
Records) with a February 4 release date
planned for the debut album, CONSUME.
“Riot” was the first single released in mid-
20 illinoisentertainer.com january 2020
December with an accompanying video on
YouTube. To contrast, Alker then played
“Analeeza” after describing it as a ”cool
summer jam.” The song came across
breezy and funky, with more banjo and
mandolin accents.
There is an undeniable sense of being
on the threshold of a breakthrough for the
band, the project initially germinated in
2017 as a desperate solo album by Alker.
He wrote three tracks of that album while
in rehab for heroin addiction, full of “hair
on fire feelings of early recovery” while
“going through all the pain and trauma” of
trying to break his addiction. He said he
wrote the songs “literally as a form of heal-
ing, as a form of therapy.” Music was his
lifeline to recovery.
“What’s significant about my story is
not that I was a heroin addict. There’s a lot
of heroin addicts out there. What’s signifi-
cant is how I went into treatment, picked
my guitar back up and music began to heal
me at the deepest level and began to allow
me to process the underlying trauma that
manifests as addiction,” he said. “And
then to be able to create a platform, to be
able to use music as a way to help others,
which is the foundation of my recovery--
being in service to others.”
Alker continued to write music after he
left treatment, eventually sharing demos
with the recovery community online. He
found he was expressing things about
recovery that others were unable to find
words for, he said. People found the songs
on his solo album inspiring, but really it
“was just a therapeutic experience.” He
described the resulting solo album
Sophrosyne as a “therapeutic snapshot” of
his life then, just as he and the other band
members reviewed snapshots of their cur-
rent place in life on that flatscreen mount-
ed on the wall: as a full band on the cusp.
The band opened for Garbage at the
Riviera Theatre on May 20, at a benefit for
Continued on page 41
continues on page 37