Frederick-based keyboardist Natalie Brooke got her formal education studying classical music and jazz at the prestigious Shenandoah Conservatory in Virginia. She got her informal education playing in local guitarist Gordon Sterling’s regular open jams—where anyone can hop onstage to improvise with a rotating cast of local musicians.

Brooke, who grew up as a metalhead, played in a jazz fusion band in college but didn’t gig live much. She’d heard about Sterling’s weekly Tuesday jam at the now-shuttered IOTA Club and Cafe in Arlington, and one night in the winter of 2017, she grabbed her keyboard and went to check it out.

“I had never gone to anything like that before,” Brooke says. “I went in super shy but then got really comfortable because everybody was so cool and it was really fun.”

That’s a similar refrain you’ll hear from other D.C. area musicians. Sterling’s jam began at IOTA in 2016 with the help of the club’s then-sound engineer Sean Gotkin (who now runs sound at the Black Cat). “It started off slow and then picked up and became this amazing thing,” Sterling says.

When IOTA closed in July 2017, he moved the jam to a bi-weekly schedule at Gypsy Sally’s in Georgetown that September—and that’s when things really took off.

“It got more of an identity,” Sterling says, especially within the area’s thriving open jam scene, which spans a variety of genres and venues. “It became more of an event in the jam community. It became a bigger hub than it was because of the nature of that place. Gypsy Sally’s felt like home to a lot of people in that scene. It wasn’t just a bunch of musicians that found a place to jam—real, lasting friendships were formed.”

With the closing of Gypsy Sally’s last month, Sterling’s jam is now entering a new era in a new home: H Street NE’s Pie Shop. Brooke is part of the house band for the now-monthly The People’s Jam, which kicks off on Feb. 11, and is helping Sterling run the new event.

The People’s Jam will be loosely structured the same way it always has: The house band—which also includes Chase Steinberger on drums, bassist Cory Belcher and guitarist Cliff Blum—will play three 10-minute sets throughout the night. In between, there will be a series of so-called bucket and select jams. For the bucket jams, musicians will put their names in a bucket that corresponds to their instrument of choice and players will be drawn randomly to form a brand-new band on the spot. For the select jams, the musicians get to pre-plan who they’ll play with. Musicians bring their own instruments, except for drums and amps, which are provided at the venue.

“I almost look at it like a gym for a musician,” says bassist Neel Singh, who spent time in the house bands at IOTA at Gypsy Sally’s and runs his own monthly open jam at Caddies on Cordell in Bethesda. “You don’t know who’s gonna be there, you show up, you get your reps in, and maybe you break through some barrier that day that you hadn’t been able to break through before. Or you watch someone else do something and that adds to your own lexicon.”

The new location brings some changes. The house band, for example, will now pick three songs (maybe an instrumental cover of a jazz or funk standard, maybe an original composition with lyrics) and jam on those songs during their sets—rather than completely creating music out of thin air.

“We’re also gonna encourage people in the select jams to either have a song they wanna do or have a certain progression they want to try—something that is a bit more engaging for the listener,” Sterling says. “The song will still be rooted in jamming, but making it a song will be more interesting to watch.”

Sterling is going to miss Gypsy Sally’s for many reasons. “There is an energy or current that ran through Gypsy Sally’s and ran through the people there that’s very difficult to describe,” he says. But he’s hoping to recreate the vibe at Pie Shop, though he knows he’s dealing with very different rooms. Gypsy Sally’s held about 300 in the main space and was one of the bigger venues that many local groups, like Sterling’s psychedelic soul band Gordon Sterling and the People, would routinely headline. Pie Shop, by comparison, has a capacity closer to 75 and is a much more narrow space.

“It might get really crammed, but I think that’s super cool,” says Brooke, who plays regularly with her own funk band under her name and is also part of the all-female hip-hop/rock group Iza Flo with local rapper (and jam regular) Dior Ashley Brown.

Sterling’s jam also serves an important networking tool and offers a chance for musicians to get to know their peers in a low-pressure situation.

“Pie Shop I felt had the best opportunity to keep the hang,” Sterling says, noting that the venue spills out onto a deck that is not unlike the alley behind Gypsy Sally’s, where musicians used to congregate after playing for a smoke break or to have a conversation. “Even if you’re outside, it’s a big glass door so you don’t feel like you’re separate from the jam and people have a place to hang and chill. The atmosphere of the hang was probably the most paramount thing in my mind.”

That aspect has been crucial for Brooke, who has immersed herself in the local jam band scene that Gypsy Sally’s helped cultivate, in large part through Sterling’s open jams.

“That whole scene became my friend group,” she says. “I had never had that big, like family feeling [in music] until the whole Gypsy Sally’s scene. When it closed, it made me realize that’s what it had become.”

The jams also led directly to a job that would prove critical to her development as a young musician. In the summer of 2017, drummer John Modell, who she met at an IOTA jam, called her up because his band, of Tomorrow, needed a keyboardist for a show later that week. She learned a bunch of songs, nailed her first performance, and ended up joining the group for a couple of years.

“I was a touring musician right out of college for two years,” she says. “I was living on the road every weekend, which was so fun and such a great experience for me. I got connected with everybody, and I was doing more social media because I was playing live all the time, which kind of boosted my career”

For Singh—a D.C. music veteran whose indie-rock band Drop Electric scored NPR’s first history podcastThroughline—Sterling’s jams have helped foster a musical community that the city had sorely been lacking.

“I never thought that in D.C. of all places that we would have such a strong sense of community amongst the musicians,” Singh says. “It was something that you always wanted as a musician but didn’t think that was necessarily going to come true. Next thing you know, we’ve all met at the jams and we’re all trading gigs and getting opening slots and forming bands together. It’s everything you want a scene to be.”

Gordon Sterling Presents: The People’s Jam starts at Pie Shop on Feb. 11 at 8 p.m. and recurs on the second Tuesday of every month. 21+, FREE.