I showed up late at the bluegress jam but they were glad to see me.

The singer-picker was playing the mega-cheapo standup bass he'd bought a few months earlier and was glad to be relieved of duty to return to what he did best.

We had a great session which ended around midnight. As we packed up his bass, the singer apologized for the instrument calling it no good.

"No playable instrument is worthless," I told him. "Especially contrabass. It was designed as a blunt instrument and the technique takes that into account."

Any instrument you can get even some of the notes out of can play a very neat part in a jam. I've picked out the melody on the flanges of an air vent or tapped it on the bars of a radiator at more than one jam.

A week later, I brought my symphony contrabass to the bluegrass jam. The results were mixed. Sure, the symphony bass is more accurate and sweeter in tone.  Still, we were playing on that elevated, nicely crafted wooden stage at the DNote with a platoon of pickers and sawyers. In that sound environment, the louder and coarser thump thump of the close-enough-for-bluegrass-intonation bass was in some ways more satisfactory than the smoother sound of the symphony bass ... which latter would rather, frankly, have been somewhere else :)