Today I’m serving up a transcription of a solo from Jerry Garcia, playing his tune “Sugaree” with the Dead at Hartford in 1977; it covers the portion from 1:30-4:00 from the 19-minute video below.
This is some of my favorite playing from Garcia: it’s an endless stream of beautiful melodies that fit the song perfectly, and his solo seems to just float peacefully on top of the rest of the band. If nothing else, the sense of freedom and joy on display is a fantastic counterpoint to the Trump administration recently deploying American military assets on the streets of American cities in a way that should disgust and worry every American (and yet a huge chunk fail to realize that they themselves are the bad guys, supporting a despotic regime that is the enemy of a free society). Anyway, on with the music.
Here Garcia solos over the band playing a simple [: B | E :] progression, in 12/8 time. B is the tonic, and we’re in B mixolydian. From just the two chords B (B D# F#) and E (E G# B), it might appear that we could just as easily be in B major/ionian, since nothing in those chords specifies a b7 (A) instead of a major 7 (A#). But the A major chord features in other parts of the song (and you can see the A chord coming out explicitly in measures 45-49 at the end of this transcription), and Garcia is very much playing B mixolydian rather than B major, hitting A notes throughout.
As I’ve transcribed it at least, Garcia’s solo plays out almost entirely within one B mixolydian shape, first at the fourth fret, and then later on an octave up at the 16th fret:
But we wouldn’t want to noodle randomly within B mixolydian, and Garcia sure doesn’t; we want to be mindful of the chord tones of our [: B | E :] progression, and where they are within B mixolydian:
And we should know where the A major triad tones are too:
There are some natural, handy voicings of these triads in this position. For instance, restricting to the D-G-B strings, we might play the chord progression like so:
Or, like in measure 45-59 of the transcription, we might use the A as a passing chord when moving from B to E and back:
And we could easily to the same moves on the A-D-G strings instead:
And you might do the same with the combined voicings of B, E and A across the middle four strings as well. Playing through the progression like this gets your ear and fingers locked in on the sounds and locations of the chord tones in this position.
This then allows you to use them to guide your solo, as Garcia does. To see what I mean, here is the beginning of our transcription, where I have illustrated where Garcia moves from a B chord tone (blue) to an E chord tone (red), and vice versa, when the chord progression moves as such:
Note that it often happens right when the chord changes (measures 2-3, 3-4, 6-7, 7-8), but also might happen just before the bar (measures 4-5) or just after it (measures 5-6, 8-9). It’s not a tight rule or anything, and you’ll see that Garcia does plenty of different things throughout, but this movement between chord tones as the chord changes is a very purposeful way to lock the solo in with the underlying harmony. Look for this in the rest of the piece.
Note too that in measures 5 and 8 above, Garcia plays some notes that are outside of our B mixolydian. He sprinkles plenty of chromatic passing notes like this in the solo (see e.g. measures 16, 25 and 41, among other spots), and also plays some quarter-tone bends and such. More than anything, listen to how he weaves great melodies both when sticking to the B mixolydian mode, and when stepping outside of it.
And really more than anything, remember that a free society is the bedrock for all the other parts of life that we sometimes get to enjoy in this world, and fight back with all your might and resources against anyone (like, say, colicky pissbaby Stephen Miller) who would like to rob you of that while a senile (though of course still evil in his own right) Trump demolishes the White House and plays builder as he goes off into his sunset.