Good morning!

I really want to make fun of this sale of paintings by Jerry Garcia, set for April 24-25 at the Bethesda Marriott. But it's a benefit for Haiti. Also, Jerry Garcia is still dead.

The Corcoran ended its "Turner to Cezanne" exhibit a few weeks early, WaPo reports, for the same reason I can never get any sleep at night: the temperature in the room was unpredictable.

WaPo's Hank Stuever reviews Treme, the new HBO series by the minds behind The Wire. He says the former has the potential to be better than the latter, but it also has an obstacle to overcome—not the complicated sociopolitics of post-Katrina New Orleans, where the series is set (well, maybe that, too). No, the writers are probably more worried about their that guy problem—specifically, that annoying guy at cocktail parties who says The Wire is the only show he watches.

Lil Wayne's prison job? To keep fellow inmates from killing themselves. Ponder that one.

Knight v. West.

Wilco (The Summer Festival). I swear this blog will never make that joke again.

Ever the bearer of bad news, I'd like to alert BPB readers to another rock 'n roll fatality: This time it's Merl Saunders, who passed away last Friday at the age of 74. Complications from a stroke sidelined him in 2002, effectively ending a remarkable career that included luminous collaborations with Miles Davis, B.B. King, Mike Bloomfield, and Jerry Garcia. His keyboard stylings combined an earthy rhythm-and-blues approach with a jazz aesthetic and, in the early 90s, a surprisingly unregrettable foray into New Age-style fusion.

For anyone interested in the remarkable, decades-long, "let's make David Grisman jealous" collaboration between Saunders and Garcia, check out the Legion of Mary sessions and the Keystone concerts. Of special note: Saunders' fat, swirly Hammond on Dylan's "Positively Fourth Street" (below, from the Keystone). Troppo largo, perhaps, but a textural improvement over the already lovely Kooper-era original.

I surveyed the gift shop. A large woman with a hairnet and a dancing-bear muumuu was browsing. This was the world premiere performance of Lee Johnson's Dead Symphony No. 6, "An Orchestral Tribute to the Music of the Grateful Dead"—not to mention Jerry Garcia's 66th birthday—and the store's silly musical trinkets and pretentious classical recordings seemed ill-suited to the evening’s proceedings. That is, except for one small novelty book, an edition of the "Wisdom from our Elders" series entitled Age Doesn't Matter Unless You're a Cheese.

Steve Harq–a short, smiling, gray-bearded man in purple tie-dye who was a beacon of ebullience as he bounced around the lobby–proudly embodied that philosophy. "Jerry's what brought me here," he said. "That was the best chapter of my life, 25 years on Dead tour. I think it's great that someone took that spirit–the spirit of Jerry and Robert Hunter—and is using it, which is what Jerry would've liked. He was so diverse in his music. He—I'm sure he's smiling and saying, 'That's fucking cool!'"

More on the concert, plus audio tracks, after the jump.

Steve paused, and his friend tried to show him a copy of the program. Steve refused to look. Under no circumstances did he want to know the set list before the show.

"You ever see them in concert?" he asked me.

"No, unfortunately," I said. "Too young."

"Well then, you have an especially good time tonight, my friend," he said. "Because, you know, it doesn't live too many places like this anymore."

I did have an especially good time, although I have to say that the performance was surprising. I expected a certain amount of stilted interpretation, and I was prepared to feel estranged from some otherwise familiar musical moments. But many of the movements had a remarkably darksome tenor to them, taking on some serious emotional heft in an orchestral context. Part of this is attributable to a largely misguided visual presentation behind the orchestra, which alternated between screen-saver visuals straight out of Windows Media Player and old photos of the Dead. These tribute elements imbued the music with an overwhelming nostalgia, and at points distracted the symphony from standing as its own creation. As one audience member noted after the show, "It was like a eulogy rather than a birthday."

Some pieces, however, really had the house spellbound–in particular "If I Had the World To Give," which was masterfully done in string quartet, and a heartbreaking rendition of "China Doll," the song that first inspired Johnson to compose the symphony. In the best moments, the levels of elegy were tempered by the music's unbending relevance–not to mention the fact that it's just so darn pretty. During "Blues for Allah," when a single hand, in the formation of a single peace sign, emerged slowly from the sea of silent heads in the front half of the hall, its silhouette falling against the conductor's white tuxedo jacket, I found myself awestruck by the peculiarity of the cultural moment: here I was listening to these songs now, this way, so many years later, after all these things had happened

Steve was right—it doesn't live too many places like that anymore. I don't go to the symphony often, but I can't say I've ever seen a packed house, never mind one hooting and hollering the way this did. Nor had I heard someone shout drunkenly in the middle of an orchestral piece, until a woman yelled "Sugar Magnolia!" in the middle of Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story Symphonic Dances, which comprised the first half of the program. (She did it during "Maria," and I have to admit, she was on to something. After all, wasn't Maria Tony's sugar magnolia?)

Other than a few unseemly outbursts, most people were enthusiastic but well-behaved. Behind me, a woman apologized to a man who had to stand up so she could get to her seat. "Don't be sorry," he said. "Be joyful! You're here!" The man, I discovered later, had gotten tickets to the show from his children for father's day. He was wearing a Dead T-shirt they bought him for Christmas. By the end of the evening it had hit me: like its creators, like its listeners, like its country, for better or for worse—music too grows up

LISTEN: "If I Had the World to Give"

LISTEN: "Blues for Allah"

LISTEN: "St. Stephen"

Photo by Valerie Steinberg