Although there is a huge body of research on the Grateful Dead, the vast majority of this work focuses on the social phenomenon of the Deadhead community. As of 2022, just a small body of serious scholarly attention has been devoted to the actual music of the band, a problem this paper seeks to address. Between the years of 1965 and 1974, the Grateful Dead developed a very unique style of improvised music, distinguished by its open-endedness, large scale and heavy use of modal improvisation. In

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... addition, the Dead's jams have the capacity to go to wildly different musical places, not necessarily staying near where they started. However, unlike other more experimental or jazz-focused groups, these jams mostly maintain a strict rhythmic cohesion. How the Dead structured their long-form jams to contain capacity for musical exploration while keeping the music accessible to the wider public via this cohesion is the fundamental question this paper seeks to investigate. To do this, I propose a new model to organize and analyze the long-form jams of the Dead. This new model involves breaking jams into "zones," large, inter-connected chunks of jams. Using this idea, I discuss characteristics of different types of zones and how zones connect and interact with each other. I also propose a new categorization system for jams, using zones to distinguish between different jam types. Using these new concepts, I provide an analysis for the famous 8/27/72 "Dark Star" in Veneta, OR.