HOOKED ON SYMPHONICS
With the latest incarnation of Phil And Friends,
Phil Lesh continues to break new ground in group improvisation.
By: Isaak Josephson
(Originally published in the August, 2001 issue of Down
Beat)
Not many musicians could get away with running a ticket giveaway contest where the price of entry was a 50-word essay on collective improvisation. Even fewer could boast a fan base that would respond en masse with enthusiasm and grace. But when 61-year-old bassist Lesh ran that contest last summer, he was bombarded with hundreds of entries, even a poem. When I point out how unique this is to Lesh one sunny spring afternoon in his band's home/office in the East Marin County, Calif., hills, he seems honestly puzzled. For him, the question, "What does collective improvisation mean to you?" is as straightforward as things like name, address and date of birth.
"It's the essence of life," Lesh simply states. "Every emotion, every esthetic, every goal, every glory exists within group musical improvisation."
Collective improvisation has indeed been the essence of Lesh's life since he took a break from studying composition with renowned serialist Luciano Berio nearly 40 years ago to define the notion in the rock realm as bassist for the Grateful Dead.
"From the very beginning of the Grateful Dead, I wanted to bring a sense of scale and structural awareness," remembers Lesh, who looks more like a professor than a musician with his lanky frame and intense, bespectacled gaze. "The idea was to expand the sense of the music to include long improvisations that would lead to another musical space."
Although Lesh was new to the bass when he joined the Grateful Dead in 1965 (his primary instrument had been trumpet) he knew enough about it to not want to use it like other rock & roll bands were at the time. "I wanted to play the bass in a more fluid manner, not play the root all the time, or play with the bass drum all the time. I tried to use the bass to make a little journey from one part of the song to the next part of the song, to connect them." In an era where rock songs usually meant three minutes and a fistful of solo riffs, those journeys became the hallmark of the Grateful Dead. Every band member's playing was informed by the same sense of sonic exploration that inspired the likes of Coltrane and Charles Ives, and at their best, there were no standouts.
"We all listened and played off each other," Lesh says. "Soloing was kept to a minimum-almost accidental; it was a group mind, a group effort. It was just like chamber music or dixieland-but real loud." The Grateful Dead's trailblazing journey came to a jarring halt with the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995 (though Lesh admits the band had become mostly formulaic in its final decade), and Lesh spent the next few years looking for closure. At one point, he was even working on a symphonic treatment of Grateful Dead material tentatively called "Keys To The Rain."
"It's hard to move on after you've been doing something for 30 years. I thought I needed to make a final statement about the music (which is what "Keys To The Rain" was supposed to be), before I could start anew." At the same time, Lesh listened to other musicians interpret Grateful Dead music, even sitting in with them from time to time. Eventually, he realized that he didn't need to have closure, "because the music is such an open-ended phenomenon." "It was an epiphany: Grateful Dead music was a repertoire for so many people already. Listening to these musicians interpret the music made me realize that there were so many completely new places I could take it. And opening myself up to those possibilities, playing outside myself was the best way for me to grow-both within the material and beyond it."
The gulf between theory and practice is never a small one, and for Lesh there was no exception. Though the elder statesman of improvisation became charged with new life, he was also weighed down by the albatross of a 30-year-old formula, serious health concerns (he had an emergency liver transplant in 1998) and the daunting task of finding musicians with both the knowledge of the repertoire and the wherewithall to retool it. So Lesh started Phil And Friends. And while it included a rotating cast of all-star improvisational musicians from the get-go, the band's first several incarnations never gave new life to the material.
For the better part of two years, Phil And Friends dragged the musical carcass of the Grateful Dead from city to city, playing a simulacrum of the music, disjointed and dirge-like. "The perspectives of the older guys who had previously had a lot of contact with the Grateful Dead were carved in stone," Lesh recalls. "They were trying to play the music like the Grateful Dead had been playing it, and we weren't the Grateful Dead." As Lesh's vision crystalized and his skills as a bandleader developed, Phil And Friends began to emerge as a more solid rock ensemble. By mid-2000, his lineup changes had slowed, and the music started to move in new directions. Then, last autumn, with Jimmy Herring (Allman Brothers, Aquarium Rescue Unit, Jazz is Dead) and Warren Haynes (Gov't Mule, Allman Brothers) on guitars, Rob Barraco (Zen Tricksters) on keyboards and John Molo (Bruce Hornsby and the Range) on drums, everything fell into place.
"Two hours into the first rehearsal, we played a jam that we still haven't surpassed. It was unbelievable!" says Lesh, almost giggling with excitement at the memory. "From the very beginning, I saw that these guys had a willingness to go beyond their comfort zones. And they innately grasped the concept of group improvisation, too.
"When I first get together with new musicians, I tell everyone, 'If you can't hear the whole band, then you're playing too loud or you're concentrating on yourself too much.' But I don't have to say that to this band. They play like they've been playing together for years, and move in and out of sonic structures like a single organism."
Overnight, Phil And Friends had molted into a group improvisational powerhouse. Lesh had what he looked for, and as with Coltrane's spin on "My Favorite Things," or the Grateful Dead's morphing of old American folk standards into multilayered, Odysseyian excursions, Phil And Friends began to catapult their repertoire into bold, new territories. By then, that repertoire had evolved to include some jazz standards and a handful of Allman Brothers tunes. In the capable hands of the new Phil And Friends, all of the pieces developed new harmonic phrasings and different rhythms. They sprouted sub-themes and coalesced in tightly-knit connections that Lesh had never before believed possible.
When Lesh invited jazz saxophonist Greg Osby to play with this new band one night, he didn't believe it either. Actually, Osby's incredulity started with the very notion that what he thought of as "hippie music" could engage him as a musician. "I'd never met Phil before, but was aware of him-mostly because my mother used to listen to the Grateful Dead," Osby says. "Then, in a Rolling Stone article, he mentioned one of my albums as being among his current favorites, and it came to pass that I was invited to come down and check them out. "I didn't really know the music, and was skeptical at first. I had these preconceived notions of it as folksy and simplistic. I had no idea that it was more rock-based, and that there were strong elements of free improvisation, and a lot of group improvisation." After some cajoling by his friend and publicist, a longtime Deadhead, Osby consented to jam with the band. As he puts it, he "was an instant convert," but as he praises Phil And Friends, Osby sounds more like an apostle. "The first thing I noticed was that Phil gave the members of the band free reign to express themselves," Osby says. "There were no musical muzzles. Phil was like, 'Do your thing. I hired you for a reason.' And they more than had the musicianship to respond to that. I was thoroughly impressed. Then, I began to realize to what extent these guys were improvising this stuff. They started in the middle of songs, with this other theme. Or, as opposed to restating the theme at the end, they modulated and segue-wayed into a completely different song. And the segue-way was sometimes longer than the song." Osby's real challenge came when Phil And Friends played jazz standards like "Blue Train" with a totally different treatment than he was used to. "That really checks your flexibility as a musician. It's so easy to get caught up in your own world. I like to always try to play outside myself, and Phil definitely provided me the opportunity to do that."
From the earliest stages of Phil And Friends, Lesh has encouraged his musicians to do just that-to play outside themselves-and their ability to do so with gusto makes the musicians in this current lineup a cut above the rest. Barraco's harmonic inflections, seemingly out of left field, are often what causes the band to shift directions mid-jam. Haynes oozes soul from every pore, with his belly-busting southern vocals and resonant guitar tone. But what really makes him an integral part of the ensemble is his ability to shift his playing on a dime to provide a colorful, sonic blanket over themes of wildly varying natures. Herring earned his spurs in the Col. Bruce Hampton school of improvisation-Hampton used to say that tuning was for sissies, and told Herring to detune his guitar, then play-and, according to Lesh, "feels more comfortable playing outside of what he's already played than just about anybody I know. "Jimmy's really open to having lightning strike," Lesh continues. "We'll just be playing along, and he'll play something that will be perfect and so out of context of what we're doing at the moment. It's stunning. It makes me laugh out loud with giddiness at what he'll put in there out of nowhere."
Percussionist Molo is fluent in a wide range of styles, and his ability to fuse them seamlessly together, floating from one to the next without missing a beat can change the feel of an entire set. Molo has been with Phil And Friends longer than anyone else in the current lineup, and, according to Lesh, "is the drummer I've been waiting for my whole life. It's so exiting! I never know what he's going to do next." That, Lesh goes on to explain, is the key to the whole band. "I never know what anyone's going to do. And I don't want to know. I want to be surprised, to giggle out loud at the sheer joy of the creation, the interplay and the dynamic, the abundance of cascading ideas. "I can't tell you how excited I am about this band. It takes me outside myself. I have to play music that's completely different than anything I've ever played."
Lesh is also dusting off his compositional skills to write music that's completely different for him. One of his most recent songs, "Walking After Midnight," is non-strophic-rare for a jazz tune, and unheard of in rock. "It doesn't repeat itself," he explains. "Melodic lines will repeat in different verses, but during the course of each verse, they modulate to the next key." Thinking that this might be a little difficult to improvise off, I ask if the musicians in Phil And Friends thought he might have gone a little too far outside himself on this one. Lesh pauses and grins sheepishly. "Yeah, the guys in the band were kind of on my case about that one," he concedes. "They said, 'Man, you've got 53 chords here!'" Then, he hastens, "But I bet it's fun to listen to." Once they have a pool of originals from everyone, Lesh says he would love to enter the studio with this band. "Everyone would enjoy that. I know we've talked about it, and Warren's already written some great new songs. One of the things I want to do in any kind of studio record this band makes is to expand the songs, to lay down a representative example of what this band does best. And that's not just the songs, but what the band does between the songs. The transitions are where the really interesting stuff happens."