My last post was a study of Scarlet>Fire from 5/8/77, and I don't feel that I completely exhausted the topic. I want to zoom in on a particularly nice line that Jerry plays at the 11:53 mark on the released version:
Jerry's playing is beguiling throughout this whole recording, but there is so much of it, so I tend to hear it as a pleasant texture rather than as a series of specific ideas. As I studied sections of Cornell Scarlet>Fire, I picked out the line at 11:53 as a good candidate for transcription because it's a self-contained passage of manageable length (sixteen bars), with a beginning, a middle and an end.
At the moment that the nice line begins, we are almost five minutes into the interstitial jam between "Scarlet Begonias" and "Fire on the Mountain." Jerry has been entering and exiting, playing some prettily ethereal ideas, but no long phrases, nothing that carries across more than a measure or two. The echo-y part at around 9:00 has some of the same ideas as the nice line, but they don't connect together fluidly. The nice line jumps out at me because it sounds like Jerry has snapped fully into focus. After it ends, he doesn't really improvise for a while; instead, he settles into the Fire intro groove.
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