Andy Coe photo by Daniel Sheehan
Ten days after Miles Davis released Bitches Brew in the spring of 1970, the trumpeter brought his group to San Francisco’s Fillmore West to open for the Grateful Dead. Davis’ expectations were low. As he wrote in his autobiography, Miles, he didn’t have much respect for popular artists. “I started realizing that most rock musicians didn’t know anything about music. They didn’t study it, couldn’t play different styles – and don’t even talk about reading music.”
Davis didn’t hold back. In Miles, few were spared his wrath. One notable exception was Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, with whom Davis “hit it off great.” After chatting backstage at the Fillmore, Davis said, “I think we all learned something, grew some. Jerry Garcia loved jazz.”
The anecdote is a case study in the never-ending interplay of Dead and jazz circles. Whether it’s Dead bassist Phil Lesh touring with the Johns (Medeski, Scofield) in the 2010s, or Dave McMurray’s recent Grateful Deadication (out on Blue Note), or Branford Marsalis’s beloved 1990s sit-ins (he calls the fan reaction, “the most bizarre thing that’s ever happened to me”), improvisatory music, regardless of form or chordal structure, attracts like minds. Here in Seattle, this phenomenon comes to a head – a flaxen, longhaired head – in the form of guitarist Andy Coe.
“Part of my quest is to suck more people into the Dead,” says Coe, “and then to suck more of those folks into jazz. It’s been one of my lifelong journeys.”
Coe played in the Roosevelt High School jazz band under Scott Brown (“I love holding down quarter notes”) before studying music at North Texas and grinding out a few years in New York. After moving back to the Pacific Northwest in the early aughts, he fulfilled a childhood dream hatched with his two elder brothers: staging a summertime Jerry Garcia celebration. Coe had long considered the Dead a match for his jazz aspirations. “To me, it kind of boils down to American music. It’s similar with bluegrass. You have these song forms. You play or sing the head and improvise over the form, always with the freedom to take a left turn and get into the complete unknown.”
That first Garcia celebration took place at the Nectar Lounge in 2005 (it turns 20 this August). Four years later, the traditional Andy Coe Band (ACB) lineup took shape: Scott Goodwin on drums, Chris Jones on bass, Gary Palmer on keys. “We were doing the annual show,” says Coe, “but we were like, this is way too much fun.” Looking for more gigs, ACB found an underutilized timeslot in an underutilized venue, Monday nights at the University District’s Blue Moon Tavern. They began playing there every week in 2013. They haven’t stopped.
On one such Monday a few weeks ago, Coe has the place in his thrall. There’s maybe a hundred fans here, bopping their heads, waving their arms, going about their idiosyncratic Dead shuffles (somewhere between zombie and simian; if you’ve seen it, you know). Some listeners perch atop the room’s wooden booths, their heads up by the ceiling. Others are locked in tight-knit conversation, sharing old concert memories. Many of these folks know each other. All of them know the music.
“There’s a slew of the same people who have been there since the very beginning,” says Coe. “Some of them are people that, growing up, I’d see at all the cool shows. But there’s a younger generation, too. And even the kids of some of our fans!”
Tim Dooley, slinging pints with a dishtowel over his shoulder, took over the Blue Moon Tavern in 2021. “I started drinking here in ’96,” he says, and offers a straightforward reason for ACB’s enduring success. “There’s not a better place in Seattle for them. This is the Grateful Dead bar.”
The Blue Moon turned 90 last year. So, the Dead and ACB are adopted sons. But it’s an appropriate match given the tavern’s long association with creatives and outcasts. In Forever Blue Moon – copies are sold behind the bar – Northwest historian and HistoryLink co-founder Walt Crowley charts the tavern’s evolution from a rumbustious watering hole to a much dirtier, equally rumbustious watering hole. Along the way, the Moon served poets Theodore Roethke, Richard Hugo, and Carolyn Kizer, and hosted visiting luminaries like Dylan Thomas and, according to “Tavern legend,” lyrical road-tripper Jack Kerouac. Survivor of umpteen near-closures, the bar has long flirted with but never gained historical landmark status. What better analog is there for the Grateful Dead?
As recently as 2021, The Seattle Times again prophesized the tavern’s imminent downfall. Dooley looked over his empty barstools and the nearby journalist suffered a poetic moment: “Yesterday’s ghosts don’t buy beer.”
How the times change! Swing through on any given Monday in the year 2025, and you’ll find that quite a lot of beer is being sold at the Blue Moon. “There are millions of Americans listening to this catalogue on a daily basis,” says ACB bassist Chris Jones. “The Grateful Dead repertoire is alive. It’s a common language just like jazz standards.” Jones says that he particularly enjoys song sections that forego chordal ideas altogether, like free jazz. “It can be both scary and beautiful,” he says of these extended jams. “Andy keeps pushing me to dig deeper, test my limits, and discover things about myself I didn’t know I had.”
Coe’s playing is in high demand these days and seemingly always has been. Along with ACB, he takes the stage with Joe Doria’s McTuff, Robert Walter’s 20th Congress, Skerik’s Bandalabra, Clinton Fearon, Patterns Fly, and others. A jazzier gig has been with Ron Weinstein, Jeff Johnson and John Bishop on first Wednesdays at the Sea Monster. “I wish I had more opportunities to play straight ahead jazz,” says Coe. “Because that’s what I like to practice.”
Plenty of this practice makes its way into Coe’s Dead interpretations. “Modal concepts, two-five-ones, diminished and half-diminished stuff. I’m inserting jazz harmony over these songs in multiple ways.” Seeing him onstage, it tracks. Twelve years into Coe’s Blue Moon gig, he’s playing better than ever, and the event has turned into a rare Seattle commodity, a dependable community celebration. Rarer yet – on a Monday. “If you do something that’s good enough on a regular basis,” says Coe, “people eventually figure it out.”
