Jazz performance is a practice of embracing vulnerability. With individual and group improvisation as its structural bedrock, jazz, particularly as it is practiced at participatory jams, privileges the unique and spontaneous contributions of its practitioners, yet operates upon an established framework of shared “standards” and performance conventions. In this respect, a jazz jam necessitates mediation between the subjective impressions of an individual musician, the shared stylistic conceit of a group, and the environment where the music is occurring. Drawing a comparative parallel between the generative processes of jazz music making and the social encounter within which the process is embedded, this project endeavors to frame the weekly meetings of the Alien Music Club at Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria as an embodiment of participatory social engagement, entailing with it the construction of an “intersectional place” where cohorts in various degrees of agreement over shared priorities and interest perform negotiations over the use of their shared space. Applying a variety of fieldwork methods, including direct observation, participant engagement, and variously structured interviews, the author investigates the roles of vulnerability and conversational exchange existing simultaneously within jazz performance and social encounter. By incorporating a polyphony of concurrent experiences of this space and time the author illustrates an ethnographic and phenomenological depiction of one emergent instance of music’s socially embedded performance context.