If you’ve followed the OSF’s painstakingly curated rollout of Bear’s Sonic Journals, and trust us, you should), then this 12th installment from the legendary tape archive of Owsley “Bear” Stanley begs the question—why Charles Ives, and why now?
As is often the case with any creative venture that hurtles into the orbit of the Grateful Dead, it started with a road trip. Back in early 1966, Bear guided the young band members on an acid-fueled ride into the Berkeley hills with the radio auspiciously tuned to a broadcast of Ives’ lush, dreamlike Symphony No. 4. Phil Lesh in particular was enthralled—so much so that eight years later, in March 1974, he excitedly recruited Bear to approach acclaimed pianist John Kirkpatrick about recording his performance of Ives’ Concord Sonata, in celebration of the composer’s 100th birthday, at the Marin Veterans Memorial Auditorium, just north of San Francisco.
Fast forward to Ives’ 150thvin 2024, when the OSF rediscovered Bear’s tapes and hoped to team up with Lesh to mix and release them: sadly, Lesh passed before that could happen, but producers Pete Bell and Hawk Semins went ahead with the project, and the resulting 2-disc set remains a powerful tribute to the enthusiasm of everyone involved. Disc 1, likely recorded on Bear’s portable Nagra deck, preserves Kirkpatrick’s performance—not to mention the warm, forgiving sound of the room—in all its colorful lushness and moments of quiet intimacy. Ives’ music is nothing if not dynamic; well ahead of his time, the composer is known for his distinctly improvisational feel, merging chord clusters and rhapsodic passages with precisely rendered melodic lines and changes in rhythm that can suggest an entire catalog of early 20th-century American popular music in the space of a few minutes.
The Charles Ives Society’s Donald Berman gives a more recent—early 2025—performance of the same piece on the set’s second disc, along with four new pieces by four different composers, each influenced in their own way by Ives’ transcendentalist worldview. Supplemented with an exhaustive 120-page booklet brimming with history, anecdotes and production details, Concordance provides all the context anyone could need to grasp how Ives’ music so profoundly captured the imaginations of Lesh and the Dead, as well as how his legacy will endure for at least another 150 years and beyond.
