Peggy McKee, a history teacher and board member of PAHA, asked me, while advancing our Jan. 25, 2015 event, whether there would be any Jerry Garcia discussions during the event, a discussion of jazz here. I said no, that Jerry was more like jam band, hippie music or “the Sixties.”

I later recalled there are at least two ways that Garcia, of the Grateful Dead, a Titan of music, would also be included in a jazz talk. One, as I did gloss in my opus, Jack Walrath once played a Jerry Garcia Day tribute. Two, and this I don’t think has ever been written about, at least not in Plastic Alto, someone told me recently that they caught Jerry sitting in with Vince Guaraldi here, or hereabouts. It may have been Bill Murphy, who I met recently – he is a guitarist — in a duo with Esther Berndt sax at CoHo. The guy who wrote about Guaraldi (“Linus and Lucy”) might know, or be able to confirm this.

Here is the brief excerpt from my longer piece about Jack and Jerry:
Jack Walrath, the former Mingus sideman, also played in the space, doing a trumpet tribute to Jerry Garcia, riffing on “Touch of Gray”, the week Palo Alto’s Mayor issued a proclamation for the dead Dead leader and onetime local music teacher.

I also took a photo of Bern Beecham, or the clip, on file at PAHA will strip in later. And I have a photo of Bill Murphy. (and there is a redundancy in my numbering, of the Garcia Tribute as a meme, I list it twice. I hope she does promote the event as more like a workshop and crowd-source than definitive. It is lyrical, as David Shields would say.).

from PAHA files, but I was the source

Bill Murphy Palo Alto jazz griot

Bill Murphy, guitar; Esther Berndt, alto sax

Research and pr re Jerry Garcia in Palo Alto led to this clip — I told this to Brad Kava, this list — and later to the longer research on jazz piece