Blues For Allah

The Grateful Dead went into a state of latent activity in the fall of 1974 that lasted until the spring of the following year when the band reconvened at guitarist/vocalist Bob Weir's Ace Studios to record Blues for Allah. The disc was likewise the third to be issued on their own Grateful Dead Records label. When the LP hit shelves in September of 1975, the Dead were still not back on the road – although they had played a few gigs throughout San Francisco…

Beyond Description (1973-1989) is a companion set to 2001's 12-disc box The Golden Road (1965-1973), which collected all of the Grateful Dead's albums for Warner Bros, adding bonus tracks to each album, along with a double-disc collection of early pre-Warner recordings called "Birth of the Dead" for good measure. Beyond Description picks up the story after the Dead started their own label with 1973's Wake of the Flood and runs all the way to 1989, when they released their last studio album, Built to Last. Like The Golden Road, each album here is enhanced with bonus tracks, running the gamut from as little as three (on Built to Last) to has many as 16 (a full-length bonus disc added to 1980's live acoustic Reckoning), but there's nothing quite as enticing as "Birth of the Dead." Indeed, "enticing" is not a word that's frequently associated with the albums in this collection.

Duck Baker is an internationally acclaimed American acoustic finger-style guitarist who plays in a variety of styles: jazz, blues, gospel, ragtime, folk, and Irish and Scottish music. He has written many instruction books for guitar, famously released several albums on Stefan Grossman's Kicking Mule label in the 70's, and later recorded for Windham Hill and Shanachie among others. Les Blues Du Richmond is a collection of previously unreleased early demos recorded for Grossman in the 70's.

On their fourth LP, LAHS (after Allah-Las, Worship The Sun and Calico Review), drummer Matt Correia, bassist Spencer Dunham, and guitarists Miles Michaud and Pedrum Siadatian A.K.A Allah Las turn their collective gaze outward and toward the horizon. Simply referencing a common misspelling of the band’s name, this release on Mexican Summer finds the band turning in their most cohesive and ambitious work yet - a record inspired less by time, but by place.

Made up of seasoned players like Jimmy Herring from the Aquarium Rescue Unit, former Santana bassist Alfonso Johnson, and Dixie Dregs alums keyboardist T Lavitz and drummer Rod Morgenstein, Jazz Is Dead doesn't function so much as a Grateful Dead cover band than as an outfit that uses Dead gems as jumping-off points for a sonic journey that leads the listener not into well-traveled grooves, but into an enthralling soundscape without rules, vocals, or fixed time signatures. Superior playing and that special brand of ESP that all good jam bands possess further enrich these adroit and artful reinterpretations of Dead songs. "St Stephen" and "The Eleven" come out sounding like a cross between Indian bazaar music and the Allman Brothers (Herring spent a year filling in for an ailing Dickie Betts in the Allmans). Recorded live at the IMAC Theater in Huntington, New York, this disc captures all the nuances and guitar wizardry that Herring can wring out of his instrument, but one suspects that this band is even more spectacular live.

Less a homage than an interpretation, less a rereading than a resurrection, Deadjazz gives new life to the music of the Grateful Dead, the legendary group of the psychedelic era. Drawing inspiration from a cult repertoire, played by musicians who have had an unwavering bond with the Belmondo brothers for decades, this collective project is an immersion in a crucial moment in the history of music: when jazz became electric to the rhythms of rock and rock freed itself from the constraints of the song format through improvisation.

During the mid-1970s, the Grateful Dead saga was unfolding like a Greek classic. The Sisyphean Wall Of Sound had nearly broken the band. From it spawned a Medusa head of countless side projects, all deliciously fruitful but woefully not the same as the whole. The chorus lay in wait, pondering the reemergence of their heroes, and wondering if "THE LAST ONE" had really been it…