Jazz Is Dead

“So I went [to Radio City],” drummer Billy Cobham told POLLSTAR. “I kind of just remember faces. I don’t remember what we played; things were sort of like very, very much on the surface.”

Cobham — whose musical career reads like a history book: drumming for Miles Davis; The Mahavishnu Orchestra; and Bobby & The Midnights, which featured the Dead’s Bob Weir, among others — was now playing with Jerry Garcia and company before a house packed with Deadheads.

“I was on such an automatic at that time that it didn’t really kind of make any sense,” he said. “Visually, I was more impressed with the individuals that I saw around me that I went, ‘I don’t know what they’re doing. Whatever it is, they know something I don’t know.’ Next case, and I left.”

It’s now 1997 and Cobham’s phone rings at his home in Switzerland. It’s booking agent Michael Gaiman in Los Angeles. He tells Cobham of an idea about putting together a band that would perform Grateful Dead music in a jazz configuration. Cobham almost hangs up on him.

Recalling his experience of performing with the Dead two decades earlier, Cobham reluctantly listens to Gaiman. “He’s telling me this and I’m going, ‘I’m not too sure I want to experience that again,'” Cobham said. But then he had a change of heart. “I thought, ‘You know, everything, and I mean a hundred-and-something- thousand people can’t be stupid. I must have missed something.’ So I decided to take another shot.”

With bassist Alphonso Johnson, who also played with Bobby & The Midnights as well as Santana and Weather Report, keyboardist T Lavitz of the Dixie Dregs and Widespread Panic, and guitarist Jimmy Herring of the Aquarium Rescue Unit, Jazz Is Dead was born.

Though the band plays Grateful Dead music, Jazz Is Dead is far from a typical cover band. Playing all-instrumental versions of Dead tunes ranging from “Dark Star” to “King Solomon’s Marbles” to “Slipknot,” Jazz Is Dead approaches the music from a jazz/rock perspective, drawing on each member of the band to continuously improvise on stage.

“I was shocked, really, because I was trying to imagine those musicians playing Grateful Dead music,” guitarist Herring told POLLSTAR, “and it was hard to imagine.”

In January of this year, the four musicians converged on Los Angeles to prepare for a tour. “We had only four days of rehearsal,” Herring said. In that time, the band arranged a set of material and hit the road on a month-long tour from Hollywood to New York City.

The culmination of that outing was the album Blue Light Rain, recorded at New York’s Bottom Line in February. “It’s funny how Blue Light Rain is representative of that first month,” Cobham said. “You can’t have everything, but I would love to have Blue Light Rain representative of the next two [months]…. The band in the first month is just a shadow of where we are now.”

An example of the band’s solidity was a gig in Columbus, Ohio. “We were playing under duress; I mean, it was a terrible environment in which to work,” Cobham said. With a storm brewing above the outdoor festival, the band walked on stage without a soundcheck, plugged in and played. “And it was wonderful. Now 70 shows earlier, that would have been an absolute disaster.”

On its tour, Jazz Is Dead, despite featuring mostly jazz musicians, hit venues and cities that most jazz bands wouldn’t play. “And that’s unfortunately a negative legacy of the United States,” Cobham said. “It’s unfortunate [that jazz] doesn’t have the legs of rock ‘n’ roll or pop music.”

Take for instance the band’s stop in Ketchum, Idaho. Why Ketchum? “To get all of these little tertiary and secondary markets happening. That’s absolutely imperative,” Cobham said. “And where you can do it in a rock ‘n’ roll environment, you’re hard pressed to try and do that in the jazz environment.”

Without a large presale of tickets, some promoters worried about the band’s shows, Herring said. “They would get nervous and about to cancel a gig because they only sold 300 tickets. So they bite their tongues and go, ‘OK, what the hell. We’ll go for it.’ Then there’s a walk-up of 1,500 people or something. That kind of stuff happened quite a bit.”

Looking at an audience primarily comprising Deadheads, Cobham doesn’t have a problem spotting the jazzheads. “The jazzers have shoes on and the shoes are normally shined, and they’re standing there and not moving … but they’re going, ‘Right on!'” Cobham said. “The Deadheads are dancing and twirling, not necessarily in time with the music, but they know every note.”

With a tour kicking off in September and plans to perform original material, Jazz Is Dead is ready to be reborn.

So is jazz dead? “Absolutely not,” Cobham said. “With jazz, you can communicate on any level. It’s just that you have to stop and think about what’s going on. Everybody’s got a brain, so it depends how much or to what extent they want to use it.”