Being Grateful
Defining the Jazz Years Part One - 1973
By JACOB HOBSON Photo SNOOKY FLOWERS
Jazz, like the Grateful Dead, has never been particularly easy to define. It seems jazz, in its most simply defined meaning, is improvised music. The Grateful Dead have been called a thousand different things since its official formation in 1965, but has rarely been called a jazz band.
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here have always been and will always be heated debates about which years were the best, which tone of Jerry Garcia’s was the best, which keyboardist was the best. I’ve heard it all: endless interpretations and conversations that go on for hours at college parties and crowded parking lots of Phish and Widespread Panic shows: “The Drug Years,” “The Heineken Years,” “The Best Years,” “The Worst Years” etc. For many, the Dead’s career gets divided by decade as the band’s lineage conveniently splits itself, for the most part, into neat categories with different pianists/
60 All About Jazz Magazine
organists being the dividing line: Pigpen Ron McKern and Tom Constanten in the 1960s, Keith Godchaux, in the 1970s, Brent Mydland in the 1980s, and Vince Welnick and Bruce Hornsby in the 1990s. This first installment of “Being Grateful” focuses on a post 1960s Dead in an attempt to examine why 1973 is one of the band’s most jazz heavy years. he 1960s and the acid tests with Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady and the Pranksters living all out beatnik, glow paint, tie-dye inventing, flute playing, Kerouac envying, free-loving lifestyles had given the Dead, for-