LOS ANGELES (AP) — Phil Lesh, a classically educated violinist and jazz trumpeter who discovered his true calling reinventing the function of rock bass guitar as a founding member of the Grateful Lifeless, died Friday at age 84.

Lesh’s loss of life was introduced on his Instagram account. Lesh was the oldest and one of many longest surviving members of the band that got here to outline the acid rock sound emanating from San Francisco within the Sixties.

WATCH: In last live performance, Grateful Lifeless bids farewell to devoted followers

“Phil Lesh, bassist and founding member of The Grateful Lifeless, handed peacefully this morning. He was surrounded by his household and full of affection. Phil introduced immense pleasure to everybody round him and leaves behind a legacy of music and love,” the Instagram assertion reads partly.

The assertion didn’t cite a selected reason behind loss of life and makes an attempt to succeed in representatives for extra particulars weren’t instantly profitable. Lesh had beforehand survived bouts of prostate most cancers, bladder most cancers and a 1998 liver transplant necessitated by the debilitating results of a hepatitis C an infection and years of heavy consuming.

Lesh’s loss of life comes two days after MusiCares named the Grateful Lifeless its Individuals of the Yr. MusiCares, which helps music professionals needing monetary or different kinds of help, cited Lesh’s Unbroken Chain Basis amongst different philanthropic initiatives. The Lifeless will likely be honored in January at a profit gala forward of the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles.

Though he stored a comparatively low public profile, not often granting interviews or talking to the viewers, followers and fellow band members acknowledged Lesh as a vital member of the Grateful Lifeless whose thundering traces on the six-string electrical bass offered a superb counterpoint to lead guitarist Jerry Garcia’s hovering solos and anchored the band’s well-known marathon jams.

“When Phil’s taking place the band’s taking place,” Garcia as soon as stated.

Drummer Mickey Hart referred to as him the group’s mental who introduced a classical composer’s mindset and expertise to a five-chord rock ‘n’ roll band.

Lesh credited Garcia with instructing him to play the bass within the unorthodox lead-guitar fashion that he would turn into well-known for, mixing thundering arpeggios with snippets of spontaneously composed orchestral passages.

Fellow bass participant Rob Wasserman as soon as stated Lesh’s fashion set him other than each different bassist he knew of. Whereas most others had been content material to maintain time and take the occasional solo, Wasserman stated Lesh was each adequate and assured sufficient to steer his fellow musicians via a track’s melody.

“He occurs to play bass however he’s extra like a horn participant, doing all these arpeggios — and he has that counterpoint going on a regular basis,” he stated.

Lesh started his lengthy musical odyssey as a classically educated violinist, beginning with classes in third grade. He took up the trumpet at 14, finally incomes the second chair in California’s Oakland Symphony Orchestra whereas nonetheless in his teenagers.

However he had largely put each devices apart and was driving a mail truck and dealing as a sound engineer for a small radio station in 1965 when Garcia recruited him to play bass in a fledgling rock band referred to as The Warlocks.

When Lesh advised Garcia he didn’t play the bass, the musician requested, “Didn’t you used to play violin?” When he stated sure, Garcia advised him, “There you go, man.”

Armed with an affordable four-string instrument his girlfriend purchased him, Lesh sat down for a seven-hour lesson with Garcia, following the latter’s recommendation that he tune his instrument’s strings an octave decrease than the 4 backside strings on Garcia’s guitar. Then Garcia turned him free, permitting Lesh to develop the spontaneous fashion of enjoying that he would embrace for the remainder of his life.

Lesh and Garcia would ceaselessly alternate leads, usually spontaneously, whereas the band as an entire would ceaselessly break into lengthy experimental, jazz-influenced jams throughout concert events. The outcome was that even well-known Grateful Lifeless songs like “Truckin’” or “Sugar Magnolia” not often sounded the identical two performances in a row, one thing that will encourage loyal followers to attend present after present.

“It’s at all times fluid, we simply just about determine it out on the fly,” Lesh stated, chuckling, throughout a uncommon 2009 interview with The Related Press. “You may’t set these issues in stone within the rehearsal room.”

Phillip Chapman Lesh was born on March 15, 1940, in Berkeley, California, the one little one of Frank Lesh, an workplace gear repairman, and his spouse, Barbara.

He would say in later years that his love of music got here from listening to broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic on his grandmother’s radio. Certainly one of his earliest recollections was listening to the nice German composer Bruno Walter lead that orchestra via Brahms’ First Symphony.

Musical influences he usually cited weren’t rock musicians however composers like Bach and Edgard Varèse, in addition to jazz greats like John Coltrane and Miles Davis.

Lesh had gravitated from classical music to chill jazz by the point he arrived on the Faculty of San Mateo, finally turning into first trumpet participant within the faculty’s huge band and a composer of a number of orchestral items the group carried out.

However he set the trumpet apart after faculty, concluding he didn’t have the lung energy to turn into an elite participant.

Quickly after he took up the bass, The Warlocks renamed themselves the Grateful Lifeless and Lesh started charming audiences together with his dexterity. Crowds gathered in what got here to be generally known as “The Phil Zone” immediately in entrance of his place onstage.

Though he was by no means a prolific songwriter, Lesh additionally composed music for, and generally sang, among the band’s most beloved songs. Amongst them had been the upbeat nation rocker “Satisfaction of Cucamonga,” the jazz-influenced “Unbroken Chain” and the ethereally lovely “Field of Rain.”

Lesh composed the latter on guitar as a present for his dying father, and he recalled that Grateful Lifeless lyricist Robert Hunter, upon listening to the instrumental recording, approached him the subsequent day with a lyric sheet. On that sheet, he stated, had been “among the most transferring and heartfelt lyrics I’ve ever had the nice fortune to sing.”

The band usually closed its concert events with the track.

After the group’s dissolution following Garcia’s 1995 loss of life, Lesh usually skipped becoming a member of the opposite surviving members after they received collectively to carry out.

He did participate in a 2009 Grateful Lifeless tour and once more in 2015 for a handful of “Fare Thee Properly” concert events marking each the band’s fiftieth anniversary and what Lesh stated could be the final time he would play with the others.

He did proceed to play ceaselessly, nonetheless, with a rotating solid of musicians he referred to as Phil Lesh and Associates.

In later years he normally held these performances at Terrapin Crossroads, a restaurant and nightclub he opened close to his Northern California residence in 2012, which was named after the Grateful Lifeless track and album “Terrapin Station.”

Lesh is survived by his spouse, Jill, and sons Brian and Grahame.

John Rogers, the principal author of this obituary, retired from The Related Press in 2021.