Let there be songs to fill the air

Good live music requires musicians open to risk. Great live music requires musicians steeped in accepting what comes next. Transcendent live music requires musicians who can become vessels of God. Every year or two, the transcendent shows up in my life. Recently it was a cover of Ripple by a band called the American Beauty Project, a group of musicians determined to remind people about the folk-inspired joys that ring through the Dead albums American Beauty and Workingman's Dead. Robert Hunter wrote lyrical, thoughtful words to many of those songs, and the words to Ripple are as poetic and beautiful as any American song -- in the stratosphere with Dylan and Chuck Berry. Jerry's voice is fine on the album, but hearing Ripple anew through the blessed voice of Fiona McBride brought me into the land of God. I found a nearly full recording from the show I heard it at. This is the transcendent:

The chorus is a haiku, I think. And that's David Mansfield on mandolin in the foreground. I had last seen him 35 years earlier, when T-Bone Burnett was guiding the Alpha Band through rehearsals in a Tesuque, NM bar before going into the studio in LA to record their great first album. You don't remember the Alpha Band? They were a footnote to the Rolling Thunder Revue who deserved to be noticed more than they were. My summer friends Andy and Oriana and Catherine and I  -- some of us worked at the Bull Ring restaurant in Santa Fe -- caught the show night after night, calling out "You're so good, bass player" regularly once we found out that David Jackson was a hired hand and not a full band member. Embarrassed, he asked us to tone it down, which we agreed to do as long as he drank with us nightly. Dylan, of course, was supposed to show up but didn't. Fiona McBride normally sings with Ollabelle, who make up much of the American Beauty Project.