NJ native Grateful Dead pianist Tom Constanten plays on with Dose Hermanos

The musical adventure of Tom Constanten continues.

A Rock and Roll Hall of Famer thanks to his time at the piano for the Grateful Dead, the Jersey Shore native is back with “Persistence of Memory,” his new album with fellow Dead organization alum Bob Bralove under their Dose Hermanos banner.

“Persistence of Memory,” available now on CD and streaming, is a mystifying meeting of the musical minds, a series of sonic sojourns to fantastic frontiers.

“I’ve described us as coherent but not congruent,” Constanten said of his work with Bralove. “We each bring something different to the table — he with his electronic wizardry ... and composition studies and I with my composition studies in Europe 60 years ago with (Karlheinz) Stockhuasen and (Luciano) Berio and (Pierre) Boulez. … Putting this together, we have all these sorts of musical discussions. Sometimes, even while we’re doing them, they sound like arguments.”

Within the realm of “Persistence,” those arguments can resolve into the sublime — “Bubbles” is an enveloping pool of acoustic piano and electronic textures that invites the listener ever-deeper — or into something sharper, such as the grandly menacing and bewitching “Garden of Delights,” a 7½ minute odyssey of the mind.

On “Garden,” Constanten explained, “I was being a downtown New York composer, like Morton Feldman or John Cage, and Bob was like a Midtown composer like Samuel Barber or William Schuman. ... It was as if Mortin Feldman and Samuel Barber met for lunch on 57th Street.”

So it goes on “Persistence of Memory,” a work that recalls everyone from Cage to, on “Cirque Des Etioles,” the digital-jazz-from-space work of “Twin Peaks” composer Angelo Badalamenti.

“It’s a multi-stylistic exploration, for sure, and that’s what we do, because both of us have intimate connections with a lot of different musical styles,” said Constanten. “And again, they’re overlapping, but he’ll come up with stuff that’s totally alien to me and I can be counted on to be alien sometimes.”

Life after the Dead

Constanten, now 78, was born in Long Branch, and lived in the city’s Elberon neighborhood until he was 6.

“I remember going to Asbury Park and the days of the Boardwalk,” Constanten recalled. “They had a little kiddie train ride and the horsey rides.”

After the Shore, his family briefly lived in Bergen County. When Constanten was around 10 years old in 1954, his father, who worked at the Copacabana in New York City, took a job at the then-new Sands Hotel and moved the family out to Las Vegas.

Constanten met future Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961. He was a contributing in-studio force for the band on LPs including 1968’s “Anthem of the Sun” and 1969’s “Aoxomoxoa.” He toured as a member of the band from November 1968 to January 1970, and his contributions during this period are still occasionally showcased in the band’s official archival releases.

In 1994, Constanten was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of the Dead. Over the years, he also crossed paths on occasion with Bralove, the innovative tech guru, engineer, programmer and sporadic on-stage performer with the Dead from 1987 to 1995.

While Constanten was in the picture more or less at the beginning, Bralove was there at the end. He’s a performer and co-writer on the final album of new material released during the band’s lifetime: “Infrared Roses,” a compilation of highlights from the Dead’s experimental “Drums” and “Space” concert improvisations.

“We sort of bookended (the Dead), in a way,” said Constanten.

The duo’s Dose Hermanos partnership, Constanten said, was born out of tragedy. The pair connected after the 1995 death of Grateful Dead singer and guitarist Jerry Garcia.

“We had a special tete-a-tete at Jerry’s funeral,” Constanten said. “And we worked out between the two of us that the thing he would’ve wanted us to do is to keep on making music.”

Intermittently active since their 1996 debut LP “Sonic Roar Shock,” Dose Hermanos is a sturdy continuation in the Grateful Dead family tradition of expanding listeners’ horizons and priming their minds for potent new experiences. That’s the sort of artistic alchemy, Constanten said, that can be traced back to Garcia’s mid-’60s innovative amalgamation of electric blues and acoustic Appalachian folk music.

“It just exploded from then on,” Constanten said, “the curiosity and interest of everybody in the band for different kinds of music ... Mickey (Hart) with drumming music from all over the world. Phil Lesh, when I first met him, was playing jazz trumpet and writing charts like Stan Kenton. And all of these rivers flowed into this tributary, getting to a larger and larger river as it went along. Fire and water both have their momentum, and we just put up the sails ... "

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Tom Constanten, NJ native, finds musical life after Grateful Dead