Amsterdam, NL – November 19th, 2025
The music collective Jam With Humans has announced the fifth edition of their annual festival, the Jam With Humans Fest 2025. Taking place on December 13th and 14th in Amsterdam, this year’s event brings together several experimental performances, open participation jams and talks, and a hands-on workshop.
Since its debut in 2017, the Jam With Humans Fest has become a yearly gathering point for Amsterdam’s music community, drawing both musicians and audiences with an invitation to work together on pushing and disrupting the current state of contemporary music.
This edition of the Fest will bring a novel split of the activities through each day, reflecting the two halves of Jam With Humans — the Academy and the Orchestra. Thus, the Saturday activities, held at the Parlour Amsterdam, will have a more pedagogical focus, while the Sunday events, held at Cinetol, will all be stage shows.
Four unique projects
The highlight of the Fest is once again the showcase of the projects incubated throughout the year under the collective’s label.
The main stage of Cinetol will see as its opener Fancy Dress Party, which has been so far represented by a trio of musicians (flute, cello and drums) playing free improvisation, in which one musician is not quite like the others.
The somewhat tongue-in-cheek humour from this project is extended by the middle act of the day, Music, Part Two. This project delivers a dada-ish, clown-ish theatrical show, in which the cast members struggle to fulfil their impossible premise of constructing a whole new musical canon, involving the audience in the process.
For the bombastic closure of a day of live music, Jam With Humans offers us a double bill, combining Surrogate — the evolution of their freestyle hip-hop collaboration with members of the ASTIRoids collective — with the fresh new project Multiple Horses — the most band-like project of the collective, presenting themselves as a rock group playing the repertoire composed not only through years of performances, but also during the multiple international residences where some elements of the group participated in earlier this year.
Featured guest: Fra Zedde
Returning to a tradition set aside for time during last year’s Fest, this edition of the festival will count with (as the organisers put it) a “very special guest”. Francesco Zedde, known on stage as Fra Zedde, will be the featured guest for most of the first day’s Fest activities. In fact, most of the programme of December 13th will be filled by a workshop on circuit-bending, in which Fra will teach attendees how to create a synthesiser our of a radio.
A bonafide player in the international underground music scene, the artist of Italian origin has a career which perfectly matches the values of Jam With Humans, from combining music, visuals and theatrical concepts in projects such as TONTO and Tacet Tacet Tacet, to putting diversity on the foreground in the curation in his long-running series of shows Discomfort Dispatch.
Bracketing the radio-hacking workshop, are two wider-audience events: the first half hour of the workshop will also double as a talk with Fra, and the last 30 minutes of the day will see a jam session featuring the workshop attendees and their radio-synths. The latter event is free and open to anyone who’d like to assist, while the talk is so far only free for workshop attendees and subscribers to the Jam With Humans Orchestra’s Patreon.
Take part in the experience
Staying true to their values, the Jam With Humans Fest of 2025 won’t be just about watching and listening — it will also offer opportunities for the audience to express themselves. Starting with the open-participation shows, the musicians in the audience will be able to sign-up for some stage time in two moments of the programme: Gameshow!, in which the musicians will compete for points while improvising, and Lucky Duos, in which a chain of never-before-heard duets will unfold. These are two of the formats developed in the past year of the collective’s residency at the Parlour Amsterdam, with the intention of creating jam-like shows that are as exciting for the audience to watch as it is for the musicians to play in.
Finally, musicians are not the only ones invited to participate in the festivities. To open the festival, a panel of Jam With Humans maestros (their name for the collective’s directors) will be discussing the work they’ve done since the last Fest, in their talk-show Beyond The Jam. This conversation is open to anyone interested in music who’s able to reach their Parlour headquarters, thus fulfilling an important part of the creative approach of the collective in constantly taking into consideration the feedback from their audience.
Event Details
Academy Day
📍 The Parlour Amsterdam
📅 December 13th, 2025
🕖 15:00 to 20:00
🎟 Workshop ticketed, other events free
Schedule
15:00 – Beyond The Jam
16:30 – Circuit-bending workshop (talk during the first half hour)
19:30 – Jam with participants
Orchestra Day
📍 CINETOL, Amsterdam
📅 December 14th, 2025
🕖 15:00 to 21:00
🎟 Main shows ticketed, open-participation shows free
Schedule
15:00 – Fancy Dress Party
16:00 – Gameshow!
17:00 – Music, Part Two
18:00 – Lucky Duos
19:30 – Surrogate featuring Multiple Horses
About Jam With Humans
Jam With Humans is an Amsterdam-based music collective that proposes a new standard for the music industry: fun, experimental, and deeply human. For the past 10 years, and counting hundreds of members in its community, Jam With Humans has been hosting performances, shows, workshops and courses (in and outside of the Netherlands) that empower people to create with others while pushing the boundaries of contemporary music.
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Visit jamwithhumans.com/press or email press@jamwithhumans.com