David Gans:
Gans approaches Grateful Dead music with a unique range and a rare degree of mastery on multiple levels: as a noted writer (his most recent volume, This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead [Nov 2015], co-authored with Blair Jackson, presents the definitive story of the Grateful Dead in their own words), commentator, and radio-show host he has introduced, contextualized, and exposed Grateful Dead music to generations of Deadheads and casual fans. As a musician, singer, and impresario he has brought the music to life in solo and ensemble configurations. As an interviewer and documentor, he has chronicled the Grateful Dead experience from a kaleidoscopic array of perspective, as an insider, an outsider, and a songsmith. His performance style makes extensive use of looping and electronics to bring the sort of shimmery elastic feel required to do this material justice.
Over the decades, the Grateful Dead have inspired a lot of cover bands, impersonators, and even reenactors capable of recreating specific renditions in precise detail; Gans is doing something different.
He has taken from the Dead their approach to music itself, making it live again but in a different realm–one populated by Gans’ own lyrical landscape– “taking it for a walk in the woods” (as Dead guitarist Bob Weir puts it), and making each performance fresh and unique.
Without any urge to duplicate, and no desire to be thought of as the “next Jerry”, Gans is mostly doing what he loves best: playing music and having a ball. “Playing this music is incredibly fun. I’ve always enjoyed getting together with people and jamming, and if you’re into it, this music is deeply enjoyable music to play.
You see and hear this in David’s approach to his own original material as well, and when he returns to these timeless gems from the Dead’s repertoire, the tradition winds on a sort of recursive, fractal, moebius-strip dimension; remaking the old and familiar into something new, fresh, and… familiar. It’s terrapins all the way down!
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