Before he wrecked his brain with heroin in the 1980s, Jerry Garcia was my favorite guitarist in the world. I was so saturated in his music during my key guitar-learning years that now everything I play tends to sound like him, up to and including Bach violin partitas.
Here’s my single favorite four-bar passage of Jerry’s, from “The Music Never Stopped” on Blues for Allah. Listen at 3:47.
Noteflight can’t convey the nuances, but at least it shows you the notes and rhythms:
These four bars include everything I love about Jerry in one convenient package. Let’s dig in!
First, the groove. When you watch guitar tutorials on YouTube about Jerry riffs, they typically imitate him by using a lot of bouncy swing. That’s a key element of his playing, but it’s easy to overdo it. Jerry’s swing is lighter than you would think. In the clip above, he’s playing almost completely straight sixteenth notes, certainly straighter than the rest of the band. If you swing this too much, it will sound corny.
“The Music Never Stopped” is in E, and this section has a looping chord progression: E, E7, A7, Am7. The riff uses Jerry’s characteristic blend of Mixolydian mode and the blues scale. At the very end, he also uses E natural minor to hit the C natural in the Am7 chord. In the third measure, Jerry combines the minor third (G) from the blues scale and the major third (G-sharp) from Mixolydian in very close proximity. This blurring of the line between major and minor is central to the aesthetic of the blues, which Jerry always cited as his first and most important musical influence.
Speaking of the blues: there are some blue notes in the second measure, pitches that fall in between the piano keys. I colored them blue in my chart (of course). The first two blue notes are somewhere between A and B-flat. The last blue note is a neutral third, slightly sharper than G natural. In formal music theory, blue notes are treated as an exotic topic when they’re mentioned at all, but you can’t understand rock guitar playing without them. Guitarists produce blue notes via string bending, and Jerry’s sound revolved heavily around this technique, especially after his years spent playing pedal steel.
So that’s the harmony. Now let’s talk about melodic shape. For the first measure and a half, Jerry does a syncopated walk down in steps. He starts with a muted E on the weakest subdivision in the whole measure, a sixteenth note after the downbeat, and then immediately makes an unexpected jump up to the flat seventh. The syncopation combines with the wide leap to give the rest of the line an off-center feeling.
The second bar is a standard blues riff, but it continues to accent weak subdivisions. The third bar is more smoothly linear, bebop-like rather than blues or rock-like. The last bar breaks the linear flow with a jump up to the top half of the scale, and then concludes with some nifty turns. Jerry wasn’t a jazz player, but he listened to a lot of John Coltrane and payed attention; the end of the last bar would sound right at home in a Coltrane solo. Jerry’s playing is nowhere near as intellectual as Coltrane’s, but they share an ability to make complex ideas sound natural and intuitive rather than showy.
So there you have it, a neat summary of everything I love about Jerry. I have said before and I will say again: Ableton Live has revolutionized my transcription process. I love being able to align a recording to the bars-and-beats grid and then zoom in and loop segments at a granular level of detail. Live is like a microscope, both in the auditory sense (because I can loop and slow things down) and in the visual sense (because I can see where waveform blobs fall the timeline grid.) Here I’ve zoomed in on the first two beats of the third bar:
Now if only the waveform showed frequency content as well as amplitude, the way DJ software does, it would be perfect! But my ears work well enough for pitch-detection purpose. And sometimes I use Live’s audio-to-MIDI function for extra help, though in this case it wasn’t necessary, I have more than enough auditory training in Jerry’s note choices to be able to identify them just fine.