For example: we had some guests over while my dad was playing guitar, one of the guests just picked up a spare guitar and started playing with him.
Or [that one video of the two sax players.](https://youtu.be/1_9IMZcbKHQ)
They hadn’t spoke before and they just started making music with each other.
I’m sorry I’m not very good at describing it but how can a musician just start a duet without talking. It seems like magic.
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Number one – there are nuanced “rules” in various genres of music that provide a framework for improvisation. What the layman calls “jamming” without any seeming structure is instead musicians following a definite (if fluid) structure. Jazz, blues, and rock music (which are all VERY closely related) have a variety of implicit structures.
Second, trained musicians can hear a sequence of musical notes (a scale) and almost instantly recognize the chord behind it, and as a melody unfolds through several bars of music, the entire chord progression becomes obvious to the trained ear. Musicians in “jam session” mode establish a pattern of a dozen or two measures of chords following a fixed pattern, and once the musicians involved understand the pattern it becomes pretty easy to play a complementary part that sounds like it was specifically written for it.
It’s not magic. But it is usually years of study and practice, studying chords and scales and harmony theory, and practice in making music on one’s chosen instrument(s).
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