The Jerry Garcia Music Arts label will release a new album titled “Front Street Outtakes” on January 5. The album tracks are composed of studio outtakes from a 1994 recording session featuring Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead and Sanjay Mishra, an Indian American guitarist-composer. The collaboration showcases a new direction the ever-creative Garcia was beginning to explore on his musical journey.
The unreleased recordings on “Front Street Outtakes” represent one of Garcia’s last full album recording projects completed at the Grateful Dead’s iconic Club Front Studios. The recordings originate from unedited material used in the creation of the 1995 album “Blue Incantation.”
As with all of Sanjay Mishra’s work, the music on the album has a multicultural and eclectic appeal. It merges Eastern and Western influences, combining Mishra’s brilliantly Indian-inspired guitar textures with Garcia’s masterful musical fluidity.
A charitable component of the “Front Street Outtakes” project will benefit Paramahansa Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship. Yogananda is known for writing the highly acclaimed “Autobiography of a Yogi.” Self-Realization Fellowship is a worldwide spiritual organization founded by Paramahansa Yogananda to serve as an instrument for the preservation and worldwide dissemination of his writings and teachings, including Kriya Yoga.
Jerry Garcia Music Arts will donate 25% of its net revenue from every digital music stream of the album to Self-Realization Fellowship.
“Front Street Outtakes” was mastered by Grammy Award-winning audio engineer David Glasser. The album will be available on most digital streaming platforms. As seen on the album cover, Jerry played the Eagle guitar for this recording — the first of several custom instruments built for him by Luthier Doug Irwin in 1971. It is noteworthy that a Sanskrit prayer for happiness is inlayed on the guitar’s fingerboard.
Reflecting on the music that he produced with Garcia, Mishra commented, “Unique and mysterious, these mixes consist of the recordings in pure form, with just the guitars and percussion, all unedited, including the tape reel running out on the first track.”
The three album tracks on “Front Street Outtakes” are titled “Loving Sky,” “Dancing” and “Pranam.”
Referring to the first track, production consultant Philip Melia, a Liverpool native and guitarist for the Pete Best Band, discussed the soul-touching “Loving Sky” experience: “Starting with a sparse and flowing luscious sound, bound to a honey-dripping solo guitar and organic tabla percussion, listen whilst looking at the sky and you can be anywhere.”
The visual elements of this music release include a booklet of liner notes featuring rare in-studio photos of the recording session along with Garcia’s music-themed pen-and-ink drawing “Uncorrected Manuscript.” This image, in its unedited and pure form, can be interpreted as a visual metaphor for the recordings on “Front Street Outtakes.”
The liner notes booklet and newly published limited-edition giclées of “Uncorrected Manuscript” are available at the Terrapin Gallery website.
“It is an honor to support Paramahansa Yogananda’s teachings with my late husband’s music,” said Manasha Garcia, co-producer at Jerry Garcia Music Arts. “There’s an interesting circularity to this project, as my grandfather gave me his copy of ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ to read when I was a teenager. Later, when I began singing in the Self-Realization Fellowship choir, Jerry would listen to the choral practice tapes and play guitar to help me follow the sheet music for the holiday recitals.”
