Bassist Phil Lesh has said that his parts came from playing counterpoint Without chord changes to react to, the musical focus shifts to modal melodies and the interaction between them. Simply playing a single chord or pair of chords repeatedly, the musicians would work around the tonic chord as a key center, an agreed point of common ground to start from. To extend a two-chord R&B rave-up for 30 minutes, they chose to move away from chordal structures into modal vamps as Coltrane and Miles Davis had. Goode.” The free-jazz and early jazz fusion styles of the 1960’s made an important mark on theīand and on Garcia’s playing.
Were characterized by long, fluid phrases that owed as much to John Coltrane as to “Johnny B.
Over time, his sound was already unmistakable by the time the band broke into the national consciousness as the standard-bearers of the hippie freak flag in 1967. This musical freedom opened the door to the distinctive combination of folk, blues, rock, and jazz elements that became the core of Garcia’s guitar style. The song, they gave the jams room to “shape-shift at will” in the words of Dead co-drummer Bill Kreutzmann. Playing off each other like jazz musicians and reacting to what was being played in the moment rather than the structure of A spontaneous musicalĬonversation rather than a set of completely predefined parts. “ Turn On Your Love Light” turned into 30-minute musical excursions, and developed a core element of the band’s sound. Of pop hits like the Young Rascals’ “ Good Lovin” or Bobby “Blue” Bland’s 1961 R&B hit Shows with just a small repertoire of songs, the need to keep a crowd dancing all night long gave rise to the extended jams that defined the Dead’s sound for the most of their career. He was known in the BayĪrea folk scene as a virtuoso banjo player before switching to electric guitar in 1965 with the founding of the Warlocks, the electric blues band that became the Grateful Dead. Like many pickers of his generation, Garcia’s interest in music was sparked by early rock & roll and rhythm & blues, but also by the folk revival of the early 1960’s.
But he should be remembered first and foremost as a daring and inventive musician, wrapping up the many threads of American music into a single, As the leader and spiritual center of the Grateful Dead, he is remembered as an icon of the counterculture and theįreewheeling spirit of the Summer of Love. Jerry Garcia was one of the most distinctive guitar voices in rock & roll.
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