For the Grateful Dead and company, the music never stopped in 2022

Deadheads had a lot to be Grateful for this year.

Throughout 2022, the music never stopped in the land of the Grateful Dead. Through both archival releases and new recordings, the band and its extended musical family continued its long strange trip through the sonic cosmos.

It’s been nearly 30 years since the Grateful Dead’s final performance. But pesky factors like linear time and Earthly geography don’t matter all that much around these parts. Here, all the years combine, so let’s just enjoy the ride.

'GarciaLive,' Volumes 18 and 19

Singer and guitarist Jerry Garcia’s extracurricular musical endeavors are chronicled in the “GarciaLive” series of archival releases, which do wonders to flesh out the musical legacy of Garcia, who died in 1995.

This year, Round Records and the “GarciaLive” team dropped a pair of doozies that act as perfect counterpoints to one another.

Released in June, “GarciaLive Volume 18: November 2nd, 1974 Keystone Berkeley” found Garcia and keyboard player Merl Saunders visiting potent musical space across a previously uncirculated two-set affair that had to be heard to be believed.

The collection finds Garcia at his most adventurous, a side of his playing that Saunders was uniquely capable of conjuring. These are, to put it bluntly, some of the dankest jams you’re likely to hear all year.

There are offerings such as a trip through Donny Hathaway’s “Valdez in the Country,” a grand, jazz-infused 17-minute jam showcasing saxophone player and flautist Martin Fierro — later of Legion of Mary alongside join Garcia and Saunders. Likewise, Eddie Harris’ “Freedom Jazz Dance” is an all-hands-on-deck funk/jazz wonder.

But Garcia knows to never float too far away from terra firma, always bringing things back home. “Valdez” lands in a rough-and-tumble pass through the Jimmy Cliff-penned Garcia chestnut “The Harder They Come,” while “Freedom” gives way to a rapturous rendering of the Bob Dylan deep cut “Tough Mama,” released earlier that year on “Planet Waves.”

Coming from 18 years later and a million auditory miles away, “GarciaLive Volume 19: October 31st, 1992 Oakland Coliseum Arena” was released in October. In contrast to the far-out work found on “Volume 18,” this album finds the Jerry Garcia Band in pure crowd-pleaser mode.

Recalling the Grateful Dead’s earliest days as a dance band tasked with keeping bar crowds grooving all night long, Garcia gleefully plays the hits here. His “Deal” is in fine, frisky form, the show-opening rendition of Holland-Dozier-Holland’s “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” is bright and welcoming and the closing cover of Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” sounds like Jerry is having a blast on Halloween.

This album shines most brilliantly in its quietest moments. Peter Tosh’s “Stop That Train” is tender, and sets the stage for a deeply powerful reading of Daniel Lanois’ spiritual masterpiece “The Maker,” delivered with a disarming clarity and directness.

Bobby Weir and Wolf Bros., 'Live in Colorado'

If 2022’s two Jerry Garcia releases showed just how deep the waters run beyond the currents of the Dead, Bobby Weir showed that there are still enchanting depths left to be explored in the most familiar of waters.

Weir has made some of the best music of his career lately, bolstered by the backing combo of the Wolf Bros. — bassist Don Was, drummer Jay Lane and pianist Jeff Chimenti — with the assistance of pedal steel player Greg Leisz and the Wolfpack horn section of Alex Kelly, Brian Switzer, Adam Theis, Mads Tolling and Sheldon Brown.

Weir partnered with Jack White’s Third Man Records to release the two-volume series “Live in Colorado” in February and October, capturing performances from June 2021 at the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison and the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater in Vail.

Beyond the campfire ballad “Only a River,” a highlight from Weir’s 2016 solo album “Blue Mountain,” and a passing glance at Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” in the midst of “Eyes of the World,” “Live in Colorado” draws entirely from the Grateful Dead’s tried and true catalog of originals and covers. But it’s the playing that makes this such a remarkable document.

Heard here, these songs are the equivalent of a forest trail willed into existence by decades of dedicated footprints. It’s at once lived-in and raw, mature and wild. At times, such as a soaring, never-better “Looks Like Rain” or a relentless, horn-drenched “The Other One,” it very well may be the sound Weir has been chasing his entire life.

Grateful Dead, 'In and Out of the Garden: Madison Square Garden ’81, ’82, ‘83'

The Dead may have been synonymous with the West Coast, but their engagements on our side of the country always brought something special out of them — especially when they took the stage at the Garden.

Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden hosted the band 52 times between 1979 and 1994. The band and the venue left such an impression on each other that in 2015, the Dead was inducted into the Garden’s Walk of Fame.

"Out of about 2,300 shows that the Grateful Dead played, the 52 we played here were nothing short of amazing," said drummer Bill Kreutzmann during the induction ceremony.

"The audience demanded that we be on our game, and more," Weir told the Asbury Park Press following the induction. "They wanted more, more than we had to offer, and we just had to come up with it."

That shared history was celebrated on “In and Out of the Garden: Madison Square Garden ’81, ’82, ’83.”

Collecting six previously-unreleased MSG shows — March 9 and 10, 1981, Sept. 20 and 21, 1982 and Oct. 11 and 12, 1983 — the 17-disc boxed set was released by Rhino in September.

The March 9, 1981 show, which was also made available as a stand-alone release, is a fantastic glimpse at a transitionary period in the band’s career.

While the playing is sturdy across the board, the X factor is keyboard player and singer Brent Mydland, who’d joined the band less than two years before and was still finding his footing.

The collective work is still plenty expansive when it needs to be, but the playing is sharper than it had been by comparison in the prior decade.

After a smokey opening double shot of 1980s originals, “Feel Like a Stanger” and “Althea,” the band heads to familiar territory, but with its teeth bared.

“Bird Song” tiptoes across a highwire for more than 11 minutes, while “Ramble on Rose” and “El Paso” sound like they’re being played in a Martian honkytonk.

The gold star moment arrives with “Ship of Fools,” a ballad of profound societal frustration originally released in June 1974 on the band’s “From the Mars Hotel” LP. Juxtaposed against Garcia’s plaintive vocal and guitar work, Mydland’s keyboard twinkling brings a brittle shimmer to this Reagan-era reading of a classic from the final days of the Nixon administration.

Planet Drum, 'In the Groove' and Dose Hermanos, 'Persistence of Memory'

Here’s where we take a trip to space.

Longtime Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart reunited with his boundary-pushing international supergroup Planet Drum, and the Grammy-winning ensemble released its first album in 15 years, “In the Groove,” in August.

Featuring Hart alongside Zakir Hussain, Sikiru Adepoju and Giovanni Hidalgo, Planet Drum is just an all-around great vibe, an experience that’s at once hypnotic and thrilling.

Elsewhere, two former members of the Dead organization also charted experimental ground. Tom Constanten, the pianist who toured as a member of the Dead from 1968 to 1970, and Bob Bralove, the tech guru, engineer, programmer and sporadic on-stage performer with the band from 1987 to 1995, returned to their Dose Hermanos pairing for “Persistence of Memory.”

The interactions between Constanten and Bralove can resolve into the sublime — “Bubbles” is an enveloping pool of acoustic piano and electronic textures — or into something darker, such as the grandly menacing and bewitching “Garden of Delights,” a 7½ minute odyssey of the mind.

If you find yourself missing the inventive delights of the Dead’s traditional “Drums” and “Space” experimental acts of improvisation, these two releases should have you covered nicely.

Further listening

The band commemorated the 50th anniversary of its landmark 1972 tour of Western Europe with the 24-LP “Lyceum 1972: The Complete Recordings” collection of the tour’s four final shows in London, as well as a remastered version of the “Europe ’72” album on CD, LP, streaming and digital, and the four-CD set “Lyceum Theatre: May 26, 1972.”

The tour’s April 7 and 8, 1972 shows were released as Record Store Day offerings, as were the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band’s 1987 recording “Ragged But Right,” originally released in 2010, and the 2006 Jerry Garcia Band album “Pure Jerry: Coliseum, Hampton, VA, November 9, 1991.”

Dead and Company — the Grateful Dead legacy act featuring Weir, Hart and Kreutzmann — returned to the road this summer for a series of often-spellblinding shows, now available to stream via Nugs. Here's our look at the tour's 13 best performances.

Alex Biese has been writing about art, entertainment, culture and news on a local and national level for more than 15 years. Alex can be reached at abiese@gannett.com and on Twitter at@ABieseAPP.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: For the Grateful Dead and company, the music never stopped in 2022