The Faster We Go, the Rounder We Get
Dead Reckoning, Modal Routes
At first glance, the idea that McCoy Tyner and the Grateful Dead might share musical DNA seems like a stretch. One built frameworks to support Coltrane’s spiritual flights—rewriting the jazz harmony playbook while turning chords into flexible architecture. The others were a San Francisco circus of psychedelic chaos and Americana grooves, an improvising rock band whose mythology often overshadowed their musicianship.
On the surface, Tyner and the Dead appear to come from different galaxies. But listen deeply, and it becomes clear: they were orbiting the same planet.
Tyner’s playing was all about shape. He built modal infrastructure—riffs and voicings sturdy enough to ground the music, malleable enough to become anything. Weir’s unconventional approach to rhythm guitar often baffled those expecting straight rock-oriented timekeeping. Rather than driving a fixed rhythm, Weir chose choppy, off-kilter voicings that sidestepped predictability, creating cross-currents that Jerry Garcia’s solos could ride, resist, or crash into. By Weir’s own account, he lifted that sensibility directly from Tyner. Listen to his chord choices and phrasing, and the throughline is unmistakable.
Seen this way, Muriel Grossmann’s project is a continuation: tracing Tyner’s influence as it threads through Weir and onward, then using it as an invitation to explore these compositions anew. Joined by Radomir Milojkovic on guitar, Abel Boquera on Hammond B3 organ, and Uros Stamenkovic on drums, she treats these four works not as artifacts to preserve, but as invitations to explore.
“We played this music using a sort of filter,” she says, “so it sounds like when I compose, record, and perform our own music. It’s somebody else’s music, but it sounds like our music.” —Muriel Grossmann, 2025
The Line from Tyner to Weir
It’s worth stating plainly: Bob Weir has cited McCoy Tyner as one of his foundational influences. In a 2024 memorial tribute to his bandmate, Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh, he wrote:
“At the age of seventeen, I listened to the John Coltrane Quartet, focusing on McCoy Tyner’s work, feeding Coltrane harmonic and rhythmic ideas to springboard off of — and I developed an approach to guitar playing based off of it. This happened because Phil turned me on to the Coltrane Quartet.”
Strange but true. Weir metabolized Tyner’s harmonic density, left-hand power, and asymmetrical swing into a singular rhythm guitar language. Listen to “Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit” from Tyner’s Enlightenment (1973), then compare it to a long jam on “The Other One”—say, 5/10/72 from the Europe ’72 box. That centerless gravity, that rolling churn? Different instruments, same engine.
The Dead were never a rock band in the strict sense. They functioned as a moving equilibrium—a push-pull between chaos and trance. Tyner understood that duality. As Coltrane’s right hand, he held space for ecstatic expansion without abandoning form. That’s what Weir heard. And it’s what Grossmann has traced back to its source.
“Grateful Dead music is inviting,” Grossmann notes. “It’s open for interpretation, yet very definitive—an incredible mix.”
It’s also spiritual music that didn’t begin in jazz, but welcomed it. And among today’s improvisers, few have carried Coltrane’s lineage of modal transcendence more consistently than Muriel Grossmann.
“Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit” (McCoy Tyner)
Premiering on Enlightenment (1973), recorded live at Montreux, this track became one of Tyner’s most powerful statements. Backed by Azar Lawrence, Juney Booth, and Alphonse Mouzon, Tyner stretches a simple modal riff into 25 minutes of dynamic, mantra-like expansion. It quickly became a staple of his live shows and is now a cornerstone of spiritual jazz. Grossmann calls it “a tune I always wanted to play,” and it’s easy to understand why.
“Contemplation” (McCoy Tyner)
From The Real McCoy (1967)—Tyner’s Blue Note debut as a leader—“Contemplation” signaled a turn inward. Alongside Ron Carter, Elvin Jones, and Joe Henderson, Tyner used space and stillness as tools, building a meditative mood without sentimentality. This piece has quietly become one of his most beloved ballads—slow-burning, soulful, and elemental.
“The Music Never Stopped” (Weir/Barlow)
First released on Blues for Allah in 1975, this Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow collaboration brought funkier, sharper rhythms into the Dead’s vocabulary. The groove is unmistakable, and the song’s lyric is a meta-commentary on the act of playing music, creating immediate resonance with the Grateful Dead’s audience. Donna Jean Godchaux’s vocal refrain, “There’s a band out on the highway…” became a kind of rallying cry, yet underneath is a subtle tension: how do we stay present while everything’s changing? It became an instant live favorite, and remained a live staple in the Dead (and post-Dead) repertoire.
“The Other One” (Grateful Dead)
Initially emerging in live Dead shows in 1967 as part of a longer suite that began with “Cryptical Envelopment,” this song was initially titled “The Faster We Go, The Rounder We Get.” That morphed into “The Other One,” which became one of the band’s central jam vehicles from the late ’60s through the mid-’70s. It evolved into one of the Dead’s most explosive improvisational vehicles, driven by Phil Lesh’s iconic “bass bomb” intros and prone to spiraling into dissonant ecstasy before snapping back into form. Grossmann’s version is elemental, starting from a subterranean pulse and building upward through free-time swirl and modal ascent. You can hear how much this band trusts the music to reveal itself. Tyner’s shadow is here too, in the way the rhythm builds from open fifths and stacked harmonies into full-spectrum lift-off. The Dead’s original versions often flared into chaos. Grossmann refracts that energy into a spiritual jazz exploration—splintered sunlight through a modal prism.
And the Band Keeps Playing On
It would be easy to present this as a concept album. Tyner meets the Dead. Jazz meets jam. Two cultures, one filter. But that’s not what’s happening here.
Grossmann isn’t making a point. She’s making music.
Her approach is neither fusion nor homage, transforming Tyner’s spiritual solemnity and the Dead’s cosmic looseness from contradictory to complementary. Muriel’s “filter” isn’t one of subtraction or removal, but of reshaping, like altering a photograph with color and light, until the subject remains but the mood and meaning shift.
As the Dead mark their 60th anniversary in 2025 and the Coltrane centennial approaches in 2026, this album reminds us that their music isn’t a relic to be celebrated once a century, but a living current—one that still speaks, instructs, and carries the spirit forward.
The faster we go, the rounder we get.
Liner Notes by SYD SCHWARTZ, @jazzandcoffee
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