John Kahn

He grew up in Beverly Hills, where by high school he had made a name as a jazz guitarist; in his junior year he switched to the double bass. After a short spell at the University of Southern California he transferred to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and by the end of the 1960s he was a working session bassist around San Francisco. In 1969 he played on Mike Bloomfield’s It’s Not Killing Me, Nick Gravenites’s My Labors and Mississippi Fred McDowell & His Blues Boys, and in 1970 and 1971 on Brewer & Shipley’s Weeds and Tarkio, the album that produced their single “One Toke Over the Line.”

His work with Garcia began in May 1970, when he sat in as bassist with Garcia and the organist Howard Wales in their mostly instrumental jam sessions around the Bay Area; that group made the album Hooteroll? (1971). From December 1970 he was the bass player in Garcia’s partnership with the keyboardist Merl Saunders, which played more than 250 shows by June 1975, and in its last lineup, billed as Legion of Mary from December 1974.

In 1973 Kahn played on two of the year’s bluegrass projects. Old & In the Way, together from January 1973 to April 1974, had Garcia on banjo, Grisman on mandolin, Rowan on guitar, Kahn on string bass and, after Richard Greene and John Hartford had each held the chair, Vassar Clements on fiddle. On 8 October 1973 Owsley Stanley and Vickie Babcock recorded the band at the Boarding House in San Francisco, and Grisman produced the album Old & In the Way from those tapes; Round Records released it in February 1975, with “Pig in a Pen,” “White Dove,” Rowan’s “Midnight Moonlight” and “Panama Red,” and Clements’s “Kissimmee Kid.” More of the Boarding House recordings, again with Kahn on bass, appeared on Acoustic Disc as That High Lonesome Sound (1996) and Breakdown (1997). Between 27 March and 14 April 1973 he also played bass at the Record Plant in Hollywood on Muleskinner’s album, with Rowan, Grisman, Greene, Bill Keith and Clarence White, which Warner Bros. issued in May 1974 as Muleskinner: A Potpourri of Bluegrass Jam.

When the Jerry Garcia Band took shape in October 1975, Kahn was its bassist, and he remained the one constant in a lineup that changed many times over twenty years. In early 1979 he formed Reconstruction, a band built around Garcia and a quartet of jazz players that played just over fifty shows that year, all on the West Coast. From April 1982 to May 1989 he and Garcia also worked as an acoustic duo, Garcia on guitar and Kahn on double bass, playing more than sixty shows. He played on Peter Rowan’s Texican Badman (1980) and Awake Me in the New World (1993).

Bluegrass came back into the picture with the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band, which performed between March 1987 and July 1988. It began with a six-song set at a benefit at the Fillmore in March 1987 by Garcia, Kahn and two of Garcia’s bluegrass partners from the early 1960s, David Nelson and Sandy Rothman, and the band went on to open thirty-one Jerry Garcia Band shows with an acoustic set. With Kenny Kosek on fiddle, it recorded Almost Acoustic, taped live in the fall of 1987 and issued by Grateful Dead Records in 1988, and its shows at the Lunt-Fontanne, the Wiltern and the Warfield in October and December 1987 were released in 2010 as Ragged But Right.

Garcia died in August 1995. Kahn died at Mill Valley, California, on 30 May 1996, at the age of 48.