11/23/86: I know all the words

photographer unknown; I got these from thejerrysite (RIP)

I am doing some spring e-cleaning and found old listening notes for 11/23/86, the "Log Cabin Boys" show that beget the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band -- it's more just a transcription of whatever conversation I could make out.  Calling it a "show" is a stretch: David Nelson and Sandy Rothman had been playing some music with Garcia as he was in recovery from his coma, and they wound up playing together at the Dead organization's Thanksgiving party (the Sunday before Thanksgiving, actually).  The Dead hadn't played publicly yet, but Garcia had a couple of JGB and Garcia/Kahn gigs under his belt at this point (including a big Halloween show at the Kaiser) and had played a few songs with Weir and Hart at a benefit the night before this (video here).  In 2012, Rothman and Nelson talked about it:

DN: By November, Jerry was getting out and doing stuff again. When it came time for the annual Grateful Dead Thanksgiving party, it was decided to have it at the Log Cabin in San Anselmo, CA. It’s an American Legion hall kind of place, but really nice – designed like a log cabin. And the three of us were the “Log Cabin Boys” for the night.

SR: We were all just sitting around a table with all the other families and people milling around in typical party fashion. Everybody was doing what they were doing and occasionally listening to us. I guess we were providing ambient music in the room, but it wasn’t like a performance – just a lot of fun.

DN: Before the party, Sandy and I were saying to each other, “Jeez – Jerry’s just been to the ends of the universe and back; what’s he going to remember about those old tunes?” So the two of us tried to put our heads together: “Let’s try that song,” and, “I think I remember how that one goes.” By the end of the evening, we realized that Jerry remembered more of the words than we did! But that was the way Jerry always was: listen once; play it.

I pull this recording out maybe once a year and always get sucked into it: if you've never given it a close listen, it's about as fly-on-the-wall as you can possibly get, listening to Garcia sitting in a corner at a party, picking tunes, and shooting the shit.  The performances are all fine, but assessing them is missing the point: they're not really even performances, anyway.  It's amazing that someone even taped it (big thanks to Steve Marcus), but unlike the Garcia/Grisman/Tony Rice "Pizza Tapes" session, there's no audible sense of occasion here, and if Nelson or Rothman had any bigger ideas about the event, they keep it cool.  One big question I do have is about the note in the text file that Dan Healy adds guitar and vocals but "does not play on the last 4 or 5 songs" -- I wonder if it's the other way around (that he shows up for the last 4-5 songs).  He's right there in one of the pictures with a guitar in hand, but I don't hear a trace of him playing at all, and only a snatch of his voice (in conversation, not music) near the end.

Otherwise, I have no comments on the music itself, other than to say that this is a delightful and priceless document of a pivotal moment in Garcia's latter day history.  There are some key pull quotes here, too, if that's your thing (I've put the really good stuff in bold).  Anyway:

d1t01.  The first thing you can hear is Jerry warming up and crowing:
JG: Fuck! So rusty, man!  My fingers, they don't know each other any more.
DN: Let's try a few and then we get in tune as we go.  That's the best way to get in tune, right?
JG: Good idea.  Let's start with something simple, Dave, and then we'll move onto something a little more difficult.
DN: OK, how about Freight Train Boogie?
And off they go.  Nelson sings lead.

They tune and chat for about 5 1/2 min - joking around about tuning up
@5:18-5:25: a really little kid is calling "Garcia!"
DN is taking a while to get in tune, prompting some wisecracks.
JG: Nelson, you're all fucked up!  
DN: Not yet, not yet.  Wait a sec, then I'll be all fucked up.
More joking around about tuning.  DN tells a story about one of Bill Monroe's bass players who would never tune.  Nelson tells a lot of stories over the course of this musical hang.

DN plays Rosalie McFall melody @9:27
JG: Ahh, great song, man. 
SR(?): Me too, that's one of my all time favorites. 
DN: Anybody know the words? 
JG: Sure I know all the words.
SR: You still know 'em? 
JG: I know all the words.  Play that sucker.

d1t02. Rosalie McFall
SR: [asks Jerry something inaudible]
Jerry: No, uh, that's "Little Glass of Wine."  That's also E or D.

d1t03. Little Glass of Wine - they just dive right in!  sweet.
JG: I love that song, I love that friggin' song. 
DN: yeah. 
JG: It's one of the world's greatest tunes. 
DN: It really is, one of the world's greatest tunes.
[they talk about some additional verses, tune some more, inaudible chatter.]
JG: --sing some more tunes if I can remember the words.  I love to sing bluegrass music.  Seems like the only chance to do it (?).  Oh, do "Drifting Too Far from the Shore"?

d1t04. Drifting Too Far From the Shore
They start, then stop to futz with the harmony arrangement, then do it for real.
JG: It's too bad one of us isn't a real tenor.
Someone hollers for "Wild Horses."
JG: I don't know if anybody here knows it.  I don't know the verses.  Pete Rowan knows them.  That's a great song, though.

dt05. Devil in Disguise - DN sings lead.
JG: Who's tune is that? 
DN: Graham Parsons.  I always liked that tune, one of the Burritos' first tunes from when the Burrito Bros first came out.
[inaudible talk about Parsons]
JG: --that motherfucker, boy, hearts would stop in the audience. It was beautiful.
[more talk about Parsons].

d1t06. Two Little Boys
JG: Yeah, that's a great little song. 
DN: Yeah.  Civil War song.
JG: [sings] "Can't you see, Jack, I'm all a-tremble."  That's a great verse.
party-goer: Ah, you guys, give it up! 
JG: Hey, dice(?) buddy! Who asked you?
DN calls Cold Jordan.  They pick a key and work out the harmonies. 

d1t07. Cold Jordan
JG: I love that, that's my favorite.  We need a quartet, not a trio.  We need a bass singer.  That's for Willie Legate.  [inaudible, laughing]
The same party-goer who heckled them before (is that Willie Legate?) comes and talks about the lyrics with them > long semi-audible conversation about Catholicism, Latin mass, other stuff.  Jerry mentions reading in the National Enquirer that Canadians are the dullest white people in the world?  I have no idea.

d1t08. On and On
JG: Boy, it's fun to sing bluegrass.   
DN: Bill Monroe.  Nothing like a good ol' Monroe song.
@3:32 JG: I'm gonna get me a drink, you guys want something to drink?  Just something wet? 

Jerry tells someone they're taking a break and will play more.  In the text file for the circulating fileset, this is noted as a "setbreak," but it's no longer than a lot of the other breaks between songs. 
Jerry comes back. 
JG: What do you wanna bet we could burn out everybody in this place?  No, they're gonna throw us out! 
Chatting about their beers seems to inspire the next tune.  They pick a key.

d1t09. Drink Up and Go Home
JG: I just love that song.  One of my favorite bar songs. 
[they joke around about the "blind man" line].
SR suggests Mystery Train.  They talk about it - inaudible, but they're talking about some particular version.  tuning.

d1t10.
JG: It's like Six White Horses.  -> they ease into Mystery Train
JG sings the verses, DN sings a verse from Six White Horses, JG ends with Mystery Train
JG: That's got a lot of good verses, but I don't remember 'em.
DN: Funny thing about that one is that the bluegrass verses are the same, they're pretty much the same. 
JG: It's all part of that same one song.  That blues song.
DG: Who was it, Clyde Moody? 
SR: I get the verses mixed up with Folsom Prison Blues.
JG: It's the same trip. [...]
DG: Elvis got it from-
JG: He got it from Big Boy Crudup. 
DG: Yeah, and the same words, the very same words come from the bluegrass guy who sang with Bill Monroe, Clyde Moody.  And it's the same thing: the train I ride, sixteen coaches long... 
-> semi-inaudible story that DN tells about a dream he had about Bill Monroe.  JG talks about seeing Bill Monroe on television.
More chatter and tuning for Life's Railway to Heaven: JG is talking about someone and how much he likes his singing and new album(?), they crack some jokes about Marlon Brando, then Jerry talks about what a good singer Robert Duvall is.
DN: I don't really know all the words to Life's Railway to Heaven.
JG: We'll blunder it.

d1t11. Life's Railway to Heaven
JG: I don't know the melody of that, really.
DN tells the story of how he learned Diamond Joe - hard to make out

d1t12. Diamond Joe
JG: Great song.
DN: Yeah, great song.  I love that song.
SR: It just comes out.
Jerry mentions that the New Lost City Ramblers played it.
DN: Let's do, uh--
JG: Remember that, oh jeez, I don't remember that at all.
SR: What were you going to say?
JG: I was thinking of, um, oops.

d1t13. banter
SR suggests a "A Little at a Time" and sings a bit of it.
JG: I remember that, it's cool ... Remember that Buzz Busby tune "Gone, Gone, Gone?" [sings] ...it's just an amazing tune.
SR: Not "Lost"?
JG: Yeah, "Lost."
SR: Oof, that's like as far into it as you can get. 
JG: [sings] "Lost in a world without you."  It's a great fucking song.  Great record, amazing record.  The solo on that is so soulful, it's so great.  Really, one-of-a-kinder. They don't get no better than that. 
SR: Or deeper.  
JG: Yeah, or deeper.
[more talk about Buzz Busby and then someone else]
JG: They're so many great songs, I wish I knew some of 'em. 
They chat about "A Voice From On High."  Jerry's trying to remember another song.
JG: We used to do it, too, as a quartet, you, me, and Weir, and Marmaduke. 
DN: Yeah, Voice From on High and, uh, let's see.
JG: The other ones we did, besides Jordan. 
DN: Yeah, it wasn't "Find Me Lifted Up."
JG: "Find Me Lifted Up" is a nice one, but it's that other one -- Swing Low Sweet Chariot.

d2t01.  Swing Low Sweet Chariot
They talk about other verses and keys. 
David tunes more.  Then not much chatter here.
DN: How about that one, that Willie(?) song.

d2t02.  Drifting with the Tide - DN sings lead. 
JG: That's a really good song.
DN: I love that song.
SR: This one?  You can do it. 
JG: Real high but we can do it. 
SR: Low and loathsome. 
JG: (laughs) Low and loathsome.  That's a great name for a band.  (they all crack up). 
DN: The low loathsome sound.
JG: Well shit, we oughta get together and play some bluegrass sometime. 
DN: I'd love to do that.
SR: Me too. 
DN: I'd find some other guys to--
JG: --sure, that'd be fun.
DN: Yes. I've finally gotten down to learning the words and everything to a bunch of songs.
JG: [sarcastic] I can do that too, Nelson (laughs). 
DN: I used to avoid it like the plague, y'know. 
JG: It's really easy to learn words, shit, I've been learning like pages and reams of words for years, I'm not real good at it.  Bluegrass tunes only have 3 or 4 verses. 
DN: Yeah.  I'm starting to think of pneumonic devices.
JG: I mean, I've just started to understand singing too.  It's like one of those things, if it gets to you late, y'know what I mean.  Singing's one of those things that'll really flash on you [inaudible]
[lots more chatter about learning songs and singing - hard to make out and transcribe]
It's one of those things, you flash on it and all of a sudden it's like Oh Man ... hearing your voice in that context where it sounds good, the room sounds good, the accompaniment sounds good ... it's really a special thing, I mean, the power of the voice... 
[Healy?]  The rooms where voices work make it really easy to do that.
[Nelson starts talking about playing here before?]
JG: We've got to get together and work some bluegrass out ... I would love it.  I love the music, and I hate being rusty.  And it don't take too long, y'know, just one of those things that a couple of times a week [?] and you just have it.  We'd get it, we have enough experience and shit.  ... The whole thing is working up a book, that's the cool thing about bluegrass is-
DN: There's always some version way back there in your head. 
JG: It's amazing, when you get back there, it's like [inaudible] like Little Glass of Wine,  hey it's been like 12 years since I've even thought of that song ... and a lot of them are like that, like imprints.
[inaudible].

Healy (I thinnk?) starts telling a story about a room he plays in, but then it sounds like a woman physically bumps into Jerry and offers him something.
JG: Aw no, you're gonna make me smoke it?
woman: You don't have to.
JG: Yeah, I'd just as soon save it, okay?  You can set my nose on fire.
woman: No, I--
JG: Thanks, actually not.  All right, this is enough.  (laughs)
//tape cuts here.


Hmm.  At the risk of editorializing, this seems like there's a lot you can read into this little exchange.  The burden of being Jerry and all that.



d2t03.  Angel Band - Rothman lead vocals
JG: Yes boys.  That's a great song.
SR: (singing) "oh the cry from the cross"  [sounds of approval]  Nobody knows that.
JG: I know, that's another great song [sings some of it]
SR: Do you know any words to that?
JG: I think I might.
SR: Really? I can follow, I don't know 'em.

d2t04.  The Cry from the Cross
They give the words a shot, then pick a key. Jerry sings lead, they stop and change keys and try again.
JG: That's a great song!  What's that other song, that Stanley Brothers gospel song... 
DN: Yeah, same record, [inaudible]
SR: That's a great song, too.  
DN: It's got Orange Blossom Special on it, and it's got Voice From On High.  [the record he's talking about, fwiw, is Country Pickin' and Singin' from 1958]
JG: Voice From On High.

d2t05.  A Voice From On High
Nelson sings lead
JG: That's a great freakin' song!  Those inversions are a bitch.  Oh shit!  How did they do it all those years?  [sings some of it again].
SR starts playing a mandolin run,
DN: Yeah, play that one.

d2t06.  Shady Grove/In Despair
This is the fast bluegrass version, not the same as Garcia/Grisman's.
Nelson & Garcia swap verses, then forget the words.  SR sings "In Despair" lyrics instead. 
and they segue right into

d2t07.  Love Please Come Home
JG sings first verse, SR sings second, it's too high for DN.
applause after this (for this first time). 
DN: Why thank you everybody. [all laugh]
[DN & SR talk about some tune that Jerry can't remember.]

JG: Hey, I gotta take the gang home ... 
girl: Jerry, I was telling them you were gonna teach me how to play right now.
JG: [laughs] Oh sure, you got five minutes? I'll teach you everything I know.

And the tape ends a few seconds after that.  Time to go sleep off those post-turkey blues!

McCoy Tyner's Sound

courtesy Joe Alper

Before it gets too far away from me, I want to give a belated tip of the hat to the late McCoy Tyner, one of the architects of a sound that was key in the development of both jazz and improv-focused rock.  That would be John Coltrane's sound, of course, but what went frequently unremarked over the decades was just how much John Coltrane's sound was also really McCoy Tyner's sound: as Ben Ratliff puts it, "when you are thinking of Coltrane playing 'My Favorite Things' or 'A Love Supreme,' you may be thinking of the sound of Mr. Tyner almost as much as that of Coltrane’s saxophone."  If you are inclined to dig deeper, see David Graham in The Atlantic or pianist/blogger Ethan Iverson.

That means, then, that Tyner unintentionally laid the groundwork for all rock bands who took their cue to "rock out on two chords, Coltrane style" in Phil Lesh's words.  Early 60's Coltrane was a key source of that information for the Dead -- Light Into Ashes' post on this is a must read.  Bob Weir was explicit about the influence of Tyner on his own approach.  I am no musicologist, but the very general jist of what made Tyner's style so influential is that his approach to playing chords ("voicing" in musical terms) was done in a way that was ambiguous and "open" enough to sustain creativity (and attention) over long periods of repetition (i.e., the "two chords" of modal jazz, as opposed to the cycling chord progressions of jazz based on blues or pop music forms).  Part of what makes Weir such a non-traditional rhythm guitarist was his distinct voicings; not all of that came directly from Tyner, although Tyner was certainly who planted that seed.  But every other improvising rock band also owes a serious debt to McCoy Tyner.

On a smaller note, Tyner also wrote the mighty Sama Layuca, which was featured on his album of the same name in 1974, and was performed a handful of times by Garcia with Reconstruction.  3/31/79 or 4/17/79 or 8/10/79 are all fine versions that are worthy of your time and attention.  But you should go listen to some McCoy Tyner first.

RIP Allen Toussaint

everything he did gon' be funky

Given what a major contributor to American music he was and how much he was in spotlight over the last decade, I know there will be far better tributes to the late, great Allen Toussaint than I could ever offer beyond my continued love for his work.  With the staggering amount of wonderful music that he wrote, songs like "I'll Take a Melody" and "Get Out of My Life, Woman" feel like a drop in the bucket.  If you are inclined to track it down, this great compilation of others' famous recordings of Toussaint's songs is well worth it -- or you could just blindly drop your finger on any collection of New Orleans R&B from the 1960's-70's and find some Toussaint-penned gold.

Tomorrow: an actual post about the Grateful Dead!  I promise, it's all written and everything.

Elizabeth Cotten

My heavens, this FolkSeattle fellow has some amazing videos on the ol' youtube.  Some of these I'd seen before (this Lightning Hopkins one in particular is a must), but somehow I only just stumbled upon this:

My god.  I don’t listen to as much of this kind of thing as I should.  Garcia was a devoted fan and played "Freight Train" with Grisman a few times over the years.  And "Oh Babe It Ain't No Lie," of course.  "Freight Train" also made one solitary surprise appearance at an electric JGB show to cover some time while Kahn changed a bass string.  Blah blah blah.  Just watch this.

RIP Wilton Felder

RIP to Wilton Felder (Sept 27), who was a great saxophonist and a monster bass player.  How monstrous?

(and that’s Paul Humphrey on drums)

To name a few more: Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On (Paul Humphrey again!) and I Want You, Joni Mitchell (Court and Spark, Hissing of Summer Lawns), John Cale (Paris 1919), 70’s soft-rock staples like “Piano Man” and “Summer Breeze”, and a personal guilty pleasure fav of mine, Michael Franks’ The Art of Tea.  He’s on Grant Green’s wonderful Live at the Lighthouse, another funky jazz record that’s near to my heart.

But his main gig was playing tenor sax with the (Jazz) Crusaders.  I’ve heard that Felder wouldn’t play sax with anyone else, saving himself solely for the group’s sound — and they definitely had a sound, soulful and funky, that never endeared them to the jazz cognoscenti despite recording a load of successful albums.  I guess you'd call them underrated these days, but I’ve never heard a bad record of theirs (although, to be honest, I’m not crossing the 1974 line).  Scratch is a stone classic with at least one tune that may be of interest to JGBheads circa 1979-1980.  I contend that the Crusaders’ sound (and instrumentation) was a key influence on Kahn and Saunders as they created Reconstruction.  Phil Lesh was about as far from Wilton Felder as bass players got, but I'd bet you anything he was one of Kahn's favorites.

Ain't Got You > U.S. Blues?

Apropos of just posting a review of a July 4th show: the other night I'm sitting on the porch with a good friend and "U.S. Blues" comes on.  He casually remarks, "you know they totally stole this from Jimmy Reed?"  Oh really?  See what you think:

For you non-blues fans, Jimmy Reed's the guy who wrote "Baby, What You Want Me To Do," "Big Boss Man," and "It's a Sin."  Pretty foundational stuff for the Dead and for rock & roll in general.

a little bit more on Stockhausen

When I said "Stockhausen was a big influence on pretty much everybody," I was really thinking about the Beatles, and Light Into Ashes reminded me about Miles Davis as well.  Paul McCartney was one of Stockhausen's more famous fans, and his influence on the Beatles (starting with "Tomorrow Never Knows") was even acknowledged on the cover of Sgt. Pepper.  This fine piece by Alex Ross does a nice succinct job of mapping the influence more specifically.

I dug out the two books that I'd seen connecting the Dead with Stockhausen: Alex Ross' excellent The Rest is Noise and Mark Pendergast's The Ambient Century both make passing mention of Stockhausen's lectures at UCLA in 1966-67 that were attended by "members of" the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane (Ross 474, Pendergast 54).  While I'd bet that Phil Lesh was the Dead's chief representative (he had already been studying this stuff prior to joining the Dead anyway), that still seems like a thread worthy of investigation.  Stockhausen himself also apparently took in some concerts at the Fillmore.

LIA also pointed out that Garcia himself shows no sign of having listened to anything like this, whereas Lesh and Weir have mentioned classical influences in interviews.  At the risk of sounding like even more of a dilettante, I'll suggest that music like Stockhausen's Kontakte may not need a lot of repeat listenings to completely re-wire one's sensibilities, particularly if one is possibly under the influence of a psychotropic substance like LSD.  Unlike, say, John Coltrane, who's impact in live performance was certainly just as visceral and potentially life-changing (cf David Crosby's great story), figuring out exactly what his band was doing probably required you to sit down and listen repeatedly to the record -- which is apparently what various members of the Dead did, Garcia included.  Certainly there is far more to music like Stockhausen's than one will ever appreciate at first listen (not that I know what it is yet), but I don't know that much of the internal workings of something like Kontakte would have really impacted the Dead.  My guess is that, outside of Phil Lesh (who, again, was already well-studied in this kind of music), no one was sitting down with the scores for this stuff and incorporating those techniques into the Dead's own musical approach.  Outside of Anthem of the Sun and Aoxomoxoa, there really wasn't much experimentation with tape loops and electronics, was there?  And by 1968, that influence was probably more directly traceable to the Beatles than to Stockhausen himself.  I'm also putting aside Seastones and Phil & Ned for now; clearly Ned Lagin owed a great deal to Stockhausen.

I would think -- and I'm just guessing here -- that someone like Garcia could have spent a couple of evenings bugging out over a record like Kontakte and then never intentionally listened to it again.  But that could have been enough: it still could have had a profound impact on his still relatively fresh and still-expanding conception of music.  I can see how just a couple of listens could prompt the kind of thinking that led to the Feedback meltdowns of the 60's, the sparse interior jams in the 1969-1970 era Dark Stars, that sort of thing.

edit: I went back through David Malvinni's The Grateful Dead and the Art of Rock Improvisation (2013), and he touches on Stockhausen a bit in one of his chapters on Dark Star, although not really in a way that answers any of my questions.  In short: 

• Tom Constanten actually studied with Stockhausen in 1967, prior to joining the Dead.  That experience rubbed off directly on Anthem of the Sun [although maybe more in theory than in practice; I always had the sense the Anthem sessions were pretty chaotic].
• Lesh was a devout admirer of Stockhausen, modeling his own early (pre-Dead) orchestral writing on Stockhausen's work.  Lesh also "ran the controls" for performances of Stockhausen's tape compositions.
• "'Kontakte' is spatial music with swirling electronic effects, based serially on the placement of speakers in a room for its full effect; it clearly is the sonic godfather of the Dead's concept of 'Space,' a rhymthically free region relying on electronic effects both within sections of pieces like 'Dark Star' and as the middle point of the second set after Drums." (Malvinni 107)
• There's another mention of members of the Dead attending Stockhausen's 1966-67 lectures (at UC Davis, according to this source, not UCLA), but no further details.
• Stockhausen redefined his music as "intuitive" and "beyond improvisation," embracing the belief that humans were on an evolutionary cusp of experiencing universal consciousness, telepathy, etc.  The Dead (and Lesh in particular) embraced similar ideas of group-consciousness (both with each other and with the audience), though that seems more like a parallel aesthetic and less like an influence.
• Stockhausen and his students may have attended the 4/24/72 Dusseldorf show… that's according to Rock Scully's book, though, so a grain of salt for that one.

So still not much in the way of specifics, beyond Kontakte begetting all the weird stuff in Dark Star, Space, etc.  I wonder if there are transcriptions or notes of Stockhausen's lectures?

RIP Ornette Coleman

Many jazz and music writers will write about Ornette Coleman more knowledgeably and eloquently than I can, so I will just share a few thoughts.  Coleman belonged to the "first name is enough" echelon of jazz giants, so I will refer to him as countless others have: Ornette.

Ornette was a true maverick genius of American music, and I'm fully conscious of the overuse of the word genius.  If a genius is someone who does something genuinely innovative yet wholly obvious and necessary in hindsight, then Ornette fits the bill.  From the start he had a clear vision: make music that sounds sounds beautiful and honest, regardless of whatever convention or pattern you may break in the process.  It's not exactly rocket science, yet at the time the idea was absolutely radical and divisive -- it still is.  Unlike other pioneers of "free jazz" (Cecil Taylor comes to mind), Ornette's music was also wholly inclusive: maybe it wasn't always approachable to those who preferred the conventional way, but Ornette's jazz never felt completely out of reach, never exclusive or closed off to non-believers.  It felt too real.  It wasn't confrontational and it wasn't explicitly reactionary: it was "folk art" in the most sophisticated sense.  Miles Davis was a contemporary who also warrants the "maverick genius" tag, but Miles' thing was always to push relentlessly, unapologetically forward, refusing to look back at what he left in his wake.  Ornette's music grew and changed over the course of his 50+ years, but it never felt like he was trying to leave anything behind.  It defied that narrative of "progress" and "development" that jazz critics love to map onto long careers like his, but it also never felt like he was being nostalgic or locked in the past either.  And it's no exaggeration to say that he completely changed the course of jazz in a way that almost no one else did: he rearranged the priorities, and folks like Miles, Coltrane, and Mingus on down changed what they were doing after Ornette's music hit.  Yet, for all of his maverick and revolutionary spirit, he was no isolationist: his music has always been about communication and community, always an ensemble music where the ensemble always remains just as much in focus as any soloist (I even chose the pic above with this in mind).

I didn't get it at first.  My father had the landmark Shape of Jazz to Come record and I listened to it as a kid and wondered what was going on.  So like much other "challenging" music, it wasn't until I got to see Ornette in person that it suddenly made sense.  This must have been around 1997 or so, and it was a reunion of Ornette with his original bandmates Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins at Lincoln Center in New York -- sadly, all have left us now.  I'm not being hyperbolic: it really was life-changing in a musical sense.  All of a sudden, "free" improvisation made sense.  It just seemed perfectly natural: three cats playing the music as it changes, grows, and moves around before us.  I had never heard anyone outside of the Dead play music in that way before.

The influence of Ornette shouldn't come as a surprise, though it wasn't talked about as often as influences like Coltrane or Charles Ives.   Weir said that the Dead were listening hard to Ornette in the 60's, and Miles Davis himself even reported that Garcia liked Ornette.  But just listen: every Dead jam that took it outside of the normal bounds owes a little something to Ornette's conception of music.

Blair Jackson's got the story of how Garcia hooked up with Ornette for 1988's Virgin Beauty album, with some extensive quotes by Garcia.  Some more pertinent background info is at deaddiscs as well.

And, of course, Ornette actually performed with them, too.  Twice!
https://archive.org/details/gd1993-02-23.116152.NeumannKMF4.daweez.d5scott.flac16
(this one has one track from Ornette's opening set with Garcia sitting in)
https://archive.org/details/gd1993-12-09.sbd.miller.91958.sbeok.flac16

But tonight, I'm breaking out the Atlantic box set, the Golden Circle trios, the amazing Science Fiction album, Dancing In Your Head and Of Human Feelings by the Prime Time band, all the way up to his final "official" album Sound Grammar that coincided with his Pulitzer Prize.  Long live Ornette!

Donald Bailey RIP

RIP to Donald Bailey (10/15/2013), who was the drummer on many of Jimmy Smith's early classic Blue Note albums, which means he nearly invented a style of soul-jazz drumming that became foundational/blueprint stuff for many of us (and certainly Merl and, by extension, Jerry)

Ethan Iverson of Do The Math has a typically excellent tribute that's enlightening in several ways.  Reading about the particularities of Bailey's drumming is fascinating, but I also had no idea that Bailey was one of Coltrane's first call substitutes for Elvin Jones!  And that there's a 1963 bootleg of Bailey playing with the Coltrane quartet... time to hit the interwebs.

There's no direct GD connection of course. While Jerry, Phil, and Bobby were all particularly open-eared listeners, I'd be surprised if any of them were really digging Jimmy Smith, who must have seemed fairly un-hip to the beatnik crowd of the early/mid 60's (but I've been wrong before).  Bailey had relocated to the west coast in the mid 60's, though, so there's certainly a chance that one of them came across him playing in a club.  Kreutzmann, I would imagine, must have known Bailey's work on some level, and I'm sure Pigpen had a Jimmy Smith record or two.  But the Jimmy Smith/Don Bailey combos were certainly one of the foundations that Merl Saunders built his early career on, so the indirect influence of this style on Jerry's early solo career is worth a passing mention.