first, a rapid boil

For the past two years my music listening has been disproportionately predisposed to live and studio recordings by the Jerry Garcia Band (and other solo JG stuff with Merl Saunders). I wasn’t sure what appealed to me so much about the JGB stuff but after going back and listening to some of my favorite live Dead shows and discovering some new ones (courtesy of RPM’s great find), I think I’ve hit on what about the JGB does it for me.

It’s got everything to do with pasta.

There are two ways of cooking pasta: the noodle way and the risotto way. When cooking noodles, you want to make sure your water is at a seriously rolling boil before you add the noodles, otherwise the water temp drops too much, takes too long to recover to boiling point and you end up with a slightly starchy mess. Risotto is exactly the opposite, since you’re sort of looking to build that starchy consistency, you add the risotto early and keep adding water as the liquid is absorbed by the risotto.

The distinction here gave me an opening to figuring out the difference between a live JGB performance and a live Dead performance. The metaphor doesn’t translate with 100% accuracy but does provide a framework for drawing distinctions between two apparently similar types of performance.

I’ve found myself playing guitar in a really wide variety of contexts. Many has been the night where I’ve looked down at my guitar then looked around the room at the people I was playing with and thought, “how the hell did I get here and who the hell are these people?” Many more have been the nights where I looked around and thought how fortunate I am to be playing with people so much better than I.

My openness to playing pretty much any type of music with anyone who is willing to play with me has let me see a few things. One of the biggest differences I’ve encountered among players is in their ability to let a piece develop before jumping in to lay down solos over it. It seems to me that there is a continuum in this regard: on one end, there are guys who look like they are going to explode if the tiniest fraction of a 12 bar blues progression gets played without someone soloing over it. On the other end, there are players who would happily and passionately play a single E chord, in the same position/formation for hours on end with or without anyone soloing over it.

Me, I tend to believe I’m on the latter end of that continuum. I love putting down single note solos over changes as much as the next guy but I’m equally happy contributing to a larger canvas of sound, especially if I’m playing with other folks who realize and appreciate that sometimes the larger canvas of sound can (and sometime should) take a hell of a long time to develop.

I first started thinking about playing and inter-playing in this context back in Cincinnati when I was playing with two guys: Dave Thomas and Chris Laille (on drums and bass respectively). I’d recently started listening to stuff like Stereolab and King Sunny Ade and started to appreciate that sometimes the constant repetition of a fairly sparse groove could develop over a long period of time into something pretty powerful and not every three chord change required a barrage of Coltrane-like notes to keep the listener interested.

But I really like playing that barrage of notes sometimes.

So when I first started playing with these two guys I felt like I was somehow obligated to fill up all the space in the grooves they were laying down. I thought that laying down lots of notes to fill up space was my role and when I wasn’t playing a whole crapload of notes I was somehow shirking my responsibilities. The cool thing, though, was that these guys pretty much encouraged me to back off and not play so much. It was as if we were just the rhythm section for a soloist who wasn’t there and as such we had to develop the groove in such a way that it became powerful and interesting unto itself. And from that point — from that developed and interesting groove — I would sporadically throw out on top a few single notes. Only now, instead of feeling obligated to deliver some Joycean diatribe, I’d instead dish out a few syllables of Basho. And it was good.

Sometimes, sure, the groove would be such that I’d go whole hog with the barrage of notes and that was good, too. But the important thing was that I no longer felt like I had to. I was playing with guys who simply dug my contribution to the canvas, regardless of how simple or complex. And that’s a great space to be playing in, especially b/c up until that point I didn’t really know such a musical space existed.

So but anyway, that’s the vibe I get from the Jerry Band stuff. It is a band of musicians who are all so totally comfortable with the long simmer. No one is rushing to put the noodles in the pot. They’ll play 3 or 4 choruses of Mystery Train as a rhythm section before the pot gets to a boil rapid enough for Jerry to lay down a solo. This is what I love. They want to make sure they get that pot up to a full boil before anyone goes and gets antsy and puts in the noodles. And if it takes 5 or 10 minutes of the same changes to do it, you get the feeling that they’re not going anywhere and you’re not going anywhere so, what’s the rush, right? If I wanted it otherwise I’d throw on the minutemen or something.

The Dead are a different story, they’re more like risotto in that the guys start adding stuff to the broth before it gets above room temp and then they’ll just keep fanning the flames to try to get the thing cooked. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just different.

Sometimes I like risotto and some of the jams that are out there on that GDLG are like some of the best risotto I’ve ever had. But most of the time I find myself firing up another Jerry Band show and watching how long it takes for the pot to come to a boil before things really start cooking.