My last post was a study of Scarlet>Fire from 5/8/77, and I don’t feel that I completely exhausted the topic. I want to zoom in on a particularly nice line that Jerry plays at the 11:53 mark on the released version:
Jerry’s playing is beguiling throughout this whole recording, but there is so much of it, so I tend to hear it as a pleasant texture rather than as a series of specific ideas. As I studied sections of Cornell Scarlet>Fire, I picked out the line at 11:53 as a good candidate for transcription because it’s a self-contained passage of manageable length (sixteen bars), with a beginning, a middle and an end.
At the moment that the nice line begins, we are almost five minutes into the interstitial jam between “Scarlet Begonias” and “Fire on the Mountain.” Jerry has been entering and exiting, playing some prettily ethereal ideas, but no long phrases, nothing that carries across more than a measure or two. The echo-y part at around 9:00 has some of the same ideas as the nice line, but they don’t connect together fluidly. The nice line jumps out at me because it sounds like Jerry has snapped fully into focus. After it ends, he doesn’t really improvise for a while; instead, he settles into the Fire intro groove.
So that’s the context. Here’s my transcription of the line with tab. I split this into nine phrases that are marked in the chart. I’ll talk through each one below. The phrase boundaries I chose are subjective; you might hear the whole thing as three phrases total, or as many more than nine phrases strung together.
When I do a transcription, first I get the audio warped out and annotated in Ableton Live. Then I go through it and notate everything in MuseScore. I loop a bar at a time, a beat at a time, or even an eighth note at a time, depending how complex the music is. Once I’m done, I export a MIDI version from MuseScore and bring it back into Ableton so I can compare it to the original recording. (You can download the MIDI here.) I do this to check my accuracy, but it can make for nice visualizations too. Here’s the first half of Jerry’s line in MIDI view, with the first three phrases marked:
Phrase one
The first measure is rising arpeggios on the B chord, with a nice little hesitation right at the very end. The second measure begins with a wistful triplet pull-off, a typical Jerry-ism. Then he begins descending through arpeggios on the A chord.
Phrase two
There isn’t any clean break separating this from phrase one, but I feel it as a new idea. It’s a two-measure walk down in sixths, a spin on a descending blues/country cliche. (Learn how to play it here, here and here.) This cliche does not have an official name, and believe me, I have searched. I have seen it variously called “Memphis sixths”, “classic sixths”, or just “the walkdown”, but none of those terms are widely used. Whatever you want to call the sixth walkdown, Jerry does a little upward arpeggio at the end, like a flourish at the end of a word written in calligraphy.
Phrase three
The third to the fourth to the third on B, then the third to the second to the third on A. From there, Jerry unexpectedly tumbles down and up through some fast triplets, culminating in a D-sharp that sustains for an entire bar. This is the kind of unpredictable thinking that characterizes Jerry’s best improvising.
Here’s the second half of the line, with phrases four through nine.
Phrase four
A short phrase, just a bar long, still in tumbling triplets, but this time using scale fragments rather than arpeggios. Jerry plays D-naturals over the A chord rather than D-sharps, implying a switch from B Mixolydian to A major.
Phrase five
A response to the fourth phrase, more scale fragments in triplets, back in B Mixolydian over the B chord.
Phrase six
Slower triplets, an arpeggiated A chord with a long accented B stuck in the middle.
Phrase seven
My favorite part: Jerry repeats an arpeggiated B9 chord, first slowly and then in repeated, rolling fast triplets. Rolling the B9 arpeggio over the A chord creates an elegant harmonic ambiguity. The phrase ends with a long, languid pulloff from B down to F-sharp down to a lower B.
Phrase eight
A quick little scribble, a chromatic walkup from D-sharp up to F-sharp, then descending scale fragments in an unpredictable rhythm to land emphatically on B.
Phrase nine
There’s a pause, as Jerry gathers his thoughts. The last phrase isn’t a fully formed idea, just an arpeggiated B major triad with the F-sharp sustaining over the A chord, followed by some more empty space as he figures out what will come next. It’s more of a question mark than an explanation point.
Are the ideas in this solo deep? Or are they just fun? “Scarlet Begonias” and “Fire on the Mountain” are both deeper songs than I originally gave them credit for, but as songs, they mainly exist to decorate their underlying groove, to give you something to engage your frontal lobe while you dance. Dancing is the ultimate point of all Grateful Dead music, as the band members have said repeatedly. The groove is all the profundity that this music really needs to provide; the notes on top are a bonus. I think the nice line is an effective melody, but it doesn’t have its full power unless you experience it in the middle of a long dance groove.