Jazz Articles about Grateful Dead

About Grateful Dead

Film Review

Grateful Dead: Meet-Up at the Movies 2026 - 6/17/91 at Giants Stadium

by Doug Collette
August 29, 2026

Grateful Dead Meet-Up at the Movies 2026: 6/17/91 at Giants Stadium Majestic 10, Williston, VT August 20, 2026 Rhino Records/Trafalgar Releasing In the fifteen years since its inception in 2011, the annual Grateful Dead community event dubbed 'Meetup at the Movies' has included more than one repeat of content. Not surprisingly, The Grateful Dead Movie (Rhino, 2004) has been screened more than once--after all, the film documents an inflection point in the iconic band's ...

Groove Orbit

How John Coltrane Changed Rock Music: The Grateful Dead

by Kyle Simpler
June 24, 2026

The Grateful Dead, probably more than any other rock band that emerged from the 1960s, tapped into the full scope of American musical tradition. From their earliest days, they were an eclectic rock band, blending elements of blues, r&b, country, bluegrass, and jazz. But rather than trying to replicate particular genres exactly, the band's goal was to allow their music to amalgamate these influences in a natural and unpretentious manner. The Dead's broad musical foundation, although something of ...

Multiple Reviews

Grateful Dead: The Music May Never Stop

by Doug Collette
July 27, 2025

The keepers of the Grateful Dead vault, overseen by chief archivist David Lemieux, must have been hard pressed to adequately commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the iconic band's formation. After all, the recognition of the half-century milestone a decade ago found the curators homing right in on the most distinctive aspects of the group's thirty-year history with 30 Trips Around the Sun (Rhino, 2015). In a reflection of the psychedelic warriors' own often inscrutable sense of logic, Lemieux ...

Book Review

The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties

by Doug Collette
July 20, 2025

The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties Dennis McNally 432 Pages ISBN: #978-0306835667 Da Capo 2025 Dennis McNally knows whereof and whenof he speaks. On The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties, the author of books about beat icon Jack Kerouac (Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation And America (McGraw-Hill, 1980)) and those psychedelic warriors known as Grateful Dead (A Long ...

Building a Jazz Library

Grateful Dead: Idiosyncratic Improvisationalists

by Doug Collette
March 8, 2025

As the Grateful Dead morphed from an eccentric folk-blues group into an eclectic jam juggernaut, the band adopted an idiosyncratic approach to improvisation they would then hone over three decades. Regular shifts of personnel nurtured an ongoing alteration of the Dead's musicianship, as did the growing wealth of original material the group interspersed with a wide range of cover songs. The following selections taken from the arc of the iconic unit's history illustrate how their distinctive means of playing together ...

Book Review

The Silver Snarling Trumpet - The Birth of the Grateful Dead: The Lost Manuscript of Robert Hunter

by Doug Collette
January 18, 2025

The Silver Snarling Trumpet -The Birth of the Grateful Dead: The Lost Manuscript of Robert HunterRobert Hunter256 Pages ISBN: #978-0306835155 Hachette Book Group2024 Notwithstanding occasional recordings under his own name and his even more rare live performances, the late Robert Hunter maintained a decidedly low public profile during his extended tenure as lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Accordingly, he kept to himself the extended writing that would become The Silver Snarling Trumpet. ...

Multiple Reviews

Grateful Dead: Multiple Metamorphoses

by Doug Collette
September 2, 2023

The ongoing Grateful Dead archival series, Dave's Picks, is becoming more fascinating as it evolves. Together and apart, Volumes 46 and 47 are cases in point: the former comes from that early flashpoint of inspired material and musicianship epitomized (but not wholly encapsulated) by Europe 72 (Warner Bros., 1972), while the latter takes place in the first year of keyboardist/vocalist/songwriter Brent Myland's decade-long tenure with the group. The irony of all this, however, is that to compare and contrast the ...