Grateful Dead and the Art of Rock Improvisation by David Malvinni (review)

Over the past fifteen years, scholarship on the Grateful Dead has blossomed, with vibrant and illuminating articles filling the pages of a peer-reviewed journal (Dead Studies) and multiple volumes of interdisciplinary essays (Jim Tuedio and Stan Spector, eds., The Grateful Dead in Concert: Essays on Live Improvisation [Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010], to name just one). Due to the perception that one must use technical musical language to discuss music, much of this fine work has centered on sociological, philosophical, economic, religious, historical, and communicative aspects of the Grateful Dead and their fervent fan base, the Deadheads. The main exceptions to this rule include analytical essays on Dead compositions and improvisations by musicologists and music theorists such as Michael Kaler, Graeme M. Boone, and Shaugn O’Donnell (Michael John Kaler, “Jamming the Blues: The Grateful Dead’s Development of Models for Rock Improvisation,” Critical Studies in Improvisation 9, no. 1 [2013]; Graeme M. Boone, “Tonal and Expressive Ambiguity in ‘Dark Star’” in Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis, eds. John Covach and Graeme M. Boone [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], 171–210; and Shaugn O’Donnell, “Bobby, Béla, and Borrowing in ‘Victim or the Crime’” in All Graceful Instruments: The Contexts of the Grateful Dead Phenomenon, ed. Nicholas G. Meriwether [Newcastle, Eng.: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007], 38–51.)

David Malvinni’s Grateful Dead and the Art of Rock Improvisation is therefore a necessary addition to the growing secondary literature on the music of the Grateful Dead. Malvinni aims for a comprehensive survey of the Dead’s entire career, attempting to elucidate the secrets behind “the transformative effect of music that does not seem to apply to other bands in the rock tradition” (p. 5). Part of Malvinni’s agenda is to correct what he perceives as a musicological bias against the band (pp. 9–10). Therefore, he situates Grateful Dead jamming within the historical and social contexts of improvisation. He plumbs a variety of improvisational theories germane to the Dead’s eclectic, countercultural interests: he finds a model for the band/audience energy interaction in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s concept of “intuitive music” (pp. 107–9), he compares the synergy between fixed and improvised elements in a Grateful Dead jam to Indian ragas (pp. 104–5), and he spends considerable time exploring the complex relationship between the Dead and blues (pp. 27–34) and both modal and fusion jazz styles (pp. 112–15, 158–60).

Following the introductory chapter, in which Malvinni considers issues of authenticity, band historiography, and philosophy (both Heidegger and Deleuze loom large in Malvinni’s thinking), he proceeds chronologically through the band’s career, choosing one representative performance of selected songs for analysis; however, there is no systematic approach to improvisational analysis. Malvinni lists some jams in meticulous tables, in which melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and other sonic events are noted alongside track timings, allowing for the reader to follow along (e.g., the analysis of “Viola Lee Blues” from 26 April 1969, p. 53). More often, he chronicles a jam in narrative prose with track timings, describing selected musical events such as significant note choices, rhythmic displacements, or changes of mode (e.g., the analysis of “Sugaree” from 19 May 1977, pp. 210–11). Other times he mentions a significant version of a song but then treats it to only one or two inadequate paragraphs (e.g., “Playing in the Band” from 6 August 1974, pp. 154–55). This lack of consistency results in an unevenness in the quality of the analyses. A visual, non-tabular aid might have complemented some of these long prose passages; however, the only musical figures provided are transcriptions of certain melodies.

His most extensive treatment of a jam is reserved for “Dark Star,” a song that he rightly maintains “signals the richest, riskiest, and most complex of the band’s improvisations” (p. xvii). The...