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Phillip Chapman Lesh (born March 15, 1940) is a musician and a founding member of the Grateful Dead, with whom he played bass guitar throughout their 30-year career. After the band's disbanding in 1995, Lesh continued the tradition of Grateful Dead family music with side project Phil Lesh and Friends, which paid homage to the Dead's music by playing their originals, common covers, and the songs of the members of his band. Phil Lesh & Friends helped keep a legitimate entity for the band's music to continue. Recently, Lesh has opened a music venue called Terrapin Crossroads, and has been performing with Furthur alongside former Grateful Dead bandmate Bob Weir. == Musical background == Lesh was born in Berkeley, California, and started out as a violin player. While enrolled at Berkeley High School, he switched to trumpet. Studying the instrument under Bob Hansen, conductor of the symphonic Golden Gate Park Band, he developed a keen interest in avant-garde classical music and free jazz. At the College of San Mateo, Lesh played trumpet in and wrote for the school's big band. (A snippet of tape of Lesh on trumpet in college can be heard on "Born Cross-Eyed" from the Grateful Dead's 1968 release ''Anthem of the Sun''.) After transferring with sophomore standing to the University of California, Berkeley in 1961, he befriended future Grateful Dead keyboardist Tom Constanten before dropping out after less than a semester. At the behest of Constanten, he studied under the Italian modernist Luciano Berio in a graduate-level course at Mills College in the spring of 1962; their classmates included Steve Reich and Stanford University cross-registrant John Chowning.〔Lesh, Phil (2005). Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead. New York: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 0-316-00998-9.〕 While volunteering for KPFA as a recording engineer during this period, he met then-bluegrass banjo player Jerry Garcia. Despite seemingly opposite musical interests, they formed a friendship, and following a brief period rooming with Constanten in Las Vegas, a subsequent day job with the United States Postal Service, and a collaboration with Reich, Lesh was talked into becoming the bass guitarist for Garcia's new rock group—then known as the Warlocks—in the fall of 1964. This was a peculiar turn of events, as Lesh had never played bass before. According to Lesh, the first song he rehearsed with the band was "I Know You Rider".〔 He joined them for their third or fourth gig (memories vary) and stayed until the end. Since Lesh had never played bass, it meant that to a great extent he learned "on the job", yet it also meant he had no preconceived attitudes about the instrument's traditional "rhythm section" role. In his autobiography, he credits Jack Casady (who was playing with Jefferson Airplane) as a confirming influence on the direction his instincts were leading him into.〔 He has said that his playing style was influenced more by Bach counterpoint than by contemporaneous rock and soul bass players—although one can also hear the fluidity and power of a jazz bassist such as Charles Mingus or Jimmy Garrison in Lesh's work, along with stylistic allusions to Casady.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Phil Lesh」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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