Phil Lesh

Philip Chapman Lesh (March 15, 1940 – October 25, 2024) was an American musician and a founding member of the Grateful Dead, with whom he developed a unique style of improvised six-string bass guitar. He was their bassist throughout their 30-year career.

After the group disbanded in 1995, Lesh continued the tradition of Grateful Dead family music with a side project, Phil Lesh and Friends, which paid homage to the Dead's music by playing their repertoire, as well as songs by members of his own group. Lesh operated a music venue called Terrapin Crossroads. From 2009 to 2014, he performed in Furthur alongside former Grateful Dead bandmate Bob Weir. He scaled back touring in 2014 but continued to perform concerts.

Lesh was born in Berkeley, California, on March 15, 1940, the only child of Frank Lesh, an amateur piano player, and Barbra Chapman. His father encouraged him to take up the violin at the age of eight. At El Cerrito High School in East Bay, he became a member of the school's marching band.

While enrolled at Berkeley High School he switched to trumpet and participated in the school's music-related extracurricular activities. He studied the instrument under Bob Hansen, conductor of the symphonic Golden Gate Park Band, and became interested in avant-garde classical music and free jazz. By his mid-teens, inspired by Beethoven and Charles Ives, he had decided that he wanted to be a composer.

Lesh enrolled at the College of San Mateo, where he wrote arrangements for the community college's big band and played trumpet. After transferring with sophomore standing to the University of California, Berkeley in 1961, he befriended future Grateful Dead keyboardist Tom Constanten. At Constanten's suggestion, he studied under the Italian modernist Luciano Berio in a graduate-level course at Mills College in the spring of 1962, where their classmates included Steve Reich and Stanford University cross-registrant John Chowning.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.