Left Coasting's Blog

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http://www.prlog.org/10063574-free-music-festival-west-coast-zonerjam-ii.html
FREE MUSIC FESTIVAL: WEST COAST ZONERJAM II
The West Coast Zoner Family is once again, very pleased to announce a full day of FREE music
in McLaren Park.

The Jerry Garcia Amphitheater
45 Shelley Drive
John McLaren Park, San Francisco
(415) 831-5500
Event Date May 31, 2008




The West Coast Zoner Family is once again, very pleased to announce a full day of FREE music at the venerable Jerry Garcia Amphitheater in McLaren Park, San Francisco. 6 bands will be performing in addition to performances by local poets, dancers, jugglers, and artists. This year's event, dedicated to the memory of Martín Fierro, is a celebration of the community spirit and camaraderie found on the lot then or online now. "The original inspiration for the ZonerJam is to create a place where friends (new & old) can get together, make music and spend time together…Only those that show up are welcome to attend", comments event organizer, Canyon DiMaio. This is a BYO event...no food, beverages, alcohol will be sold. This event was sponsored by donations from various Zoner folks from all over the country. A very sincere thank you goes out to everyone who helped make this happen again!!

Sue Weiand's photos from West Coast Zoner Jam '07
http://www.molecularmusic.org/gallery2/zonerjam/

Emcee: Sam Flot
Scheduled performers;

Jessica with Desert Dream Dance Co (11:45, 1:30 & 3:40)
Santa Cruz belly dancers Jessica, Brandice, and Janelle are cooking up a medley of
psychedelic solos created just for the WCZJ2. This will be a colorful and upbeat fusion of Middle
Eastern dance and classic rock culture. In addition, they will be performing a troupe piece from the Desert Dream Dance Company's repertoire, created by director Janelle Rodriguez. www.janelledance.com ; http://myspace.com/sababatahiya

Gazelles (12:00PM – 12:30PM) Gazelles is a San Francisco duo featuring Garrin Benfield on
guitar, loops and soundscapes in conjunction with Post-Beat Poet Sam Flot performing his
original poetry. Gazelles is a band that operates within a loose structure intended to allow the
music and words to combine together to define which landscape will be crossed at any given
intersection of time, place, guitar and words. http://www.garrin.com

Lost Ticket (12:40PM – 1:30PM)
Lost Ticket is a trio rooted in classic hard rock. Their original songs are frighteningly fast and
furious. Lost Ticket is made up of Bay Area rock veterans Douglas Garay (Pebble Theory,
Dedicated Maniacs) on bass and vocals, Paul Joseph (Pockit) on guitar and lead vocals, &
Thomas Perry (Flametal, Skeletons, Pockit) on drums, percussion and vocals. Lost Ticket's debut
record, "Warning" was released in 2007. "Lost Ticket: Black Sabbath mixed with Cream, and
make it heavy!" http://www.myspace.com/LostTicket

West County Outlaws (1:50PM – 2:40PM)
"We love to share our music!" Todd Gorman states proudly. Gorman is the propellant behind the
inception of the West County Outlaws philosophy. Founded in the winter of 2006, West County
Outlaws play original and covered material. Rooted in Americana, the San Francisco Sound, r/b
and good ole rock'n roll, West County Outlaws bring harmony and musical dialog to their
performances. In addition the band includes Van Solkov, songwriter extraordinaire and bassist,
Boyd Bel on lead guitar. Boyd comes from the grand city of New Orleans, now residing in Cotati,
and Lisa DiMaio on vocals. http://www.myspace.com/westcountyoutlaws

Left Coasting (2:50PM – 3:40PM)
Inspired by the principle of Zen Parking {you need not actively seek the space, it will present
itself to you}, a vision was born of starting a band that would use improvisation to create itself
rather than be created. This band's diverse style, draws on various musical traditions, including
funk, blues, improvisational rock, folk and jazz, engaging in free improvisation, in effect
spontaneously composing music that has never been heard before by the audiences or the
players themselves. Blending a mix of originals and covers, there's always fun to be had when
Left Coasting hits the stage! http://www.leftcoasting.com

William Mylar Band (4:00PM – 4:55PM)
The William Mylar Band is a project made up of musicians who have regular gigs with other
bands. The band features, William Mylar, who has become well known over the last 30
years primarily as a singer/songwriter. His music was dubbed "Folk Wave" in the 70s because of
his eclectic arrangement of different genres into acoustic/electric presentations. The members of
the William Mylar Band and their primary work: Mylar – Guitar/Vocals, Mike Klepic – Keyboards
(Skynnyn Lynnyrd), Tim Fisher – Bass/Vocals (Frankie Lee, Dana Moret), Glenn Hair –
Guitar/Vocals (Vivian Lee), Peter Philis – Drums/Vocals (Mind X)
http://www.mylarville.com

Roarshock (4:55PM – 5:00PM)
(aka D. A. Wilson) will read an original poem -- composed in 1979 -- which celebrates life and the
root spirit of the ZonerJam -- the music of the Grateful Dead.

Dedicated Maniacs (5:00PM – 5:55PM) The Dedicated Maniacs are a group of veteran Bay
Area musicians inspired by the psychedelic cowboy music of the New Riders of the Purple Sage,
Grateful Dead, David Nelson Band, Willie Nelson, etc. They actively utilize their improvisational
and general weirdness skills to reinterpret the classic American music catalog of the West and
Southwest.
http://www.myspace.com/dedicatedmaniacs

AllZonerJam (5:56PM – 6:30PM) with Bellydancing

Josh Interviewed

MUSIC & THE SPIRIT
Study to see how we perceive music

Researchers at UC Davis into the groove: They're wondering if music and euphoria are linked in our brains

By Candace Murphy, STAFF WRITER

JOSH ATLAS is no stranger to the musical groove.

Still, the 35-year-old bass player in the San Francisco funky blues jam rock band Left Coasting struggles to put the feeling of the musical groove into words. He just knows that when he's in it, he ends up with a wicked case of goose bumps.

"It starts in the brain. I'm a very rational person, but I know that and feel that," says Atlas, a fan of everything in music from rap to metal to rap-metal to jazz to jam bands. "Then the heart beats faster, the body moves, and then when the song is right, the goose bumps start happening. But it's the brain — the brain is what starts it."

Talk about out of the mouths of babes. Because 70 miles northeast of Atlas is a neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis, who's just received a $1 million grant to figure out why listening to music, and achieving that state of being in the musical groove, is such a heady experience. Research begins later this month.

"It really is a coup to get a grant like this," says Petr Janata, the neuroscientist who serves as an assistant professor of psychology at the university as well as a faculty member in the Center for Mind and Brain.

It's no stretch to call the research — which compared to the topic has the relatively unexciting title of "Music, Spirituality, Religion and the Human Brain" — a pet project of Janata's. Janata, 39, a devoted Deadhead, has been to his share of Grateful Dead shows. He has seen the spinners, the tie-dyed legions lose themselves in the moment. He has seen, as the late Jerry Garcia himself might say, fanslose themselves in the music only to come to an understanding that they're a molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe.

No joke. The music does that to some people. And Janata wants to find out why.

"There are hypotheses about what the brain is doing when we're dancing along with music or engaged in music in a participatory way," says Janata. "What largely interests me is how these profoundly joyous or ecstatic emotions people talk about when they're really in the musical groove come about."

Previous studies have found that people who've had intensely spiritual experiences describe them in much the same manner as people who've had deep musical experiences. Janata wants to take it a step further, or at least further inside the body, and see if the same parts of the brain are activated in each case.

"People talk about feeling connected with everything, or that there's a sense of timelessness or profound joy in both music and spiritual experiences," says Janata. "You compare those descriptions, whether they're the same with music as with something else, and then as a neuroscientist, I view the brain mechanism. If I can show the same part of the brain being modulated in these different contexts, then there's no difference at the neuroscience level, and the experiences are the same, regardless of the language that one lays on it."

It may not be so easy, though. Even the most naive know that music concerts, where people experience their deepest connections with music, are fueled in many cases by alcohol or drugs. What, like it was really plausible the women on their boyfriends' shoulders at the Whitesnake show took their tube tops off while sober?

Besides, everyone knows the old joke about the Grateful Dead fan who sobered up at a Dead show and realized, "Wow, this band sucks."

When Janata is asked how he can take the glorious effects of mind-altering substances out of the equation, he sighs.

"That's the first question that pops into everybody's minds," says Janata. "In the first proposal, we didn't address that, and the reviewers were like, 'You missed a really salient aspect here.'"

Janata admits that alcohol and drugs surely shape some musical experiences, but there is of course no intent to include any pharmacological components in the study. Janata is assuming his subjects will come in straight and will engage in the music purely. He doesn't think that will radically affect the study.

"While it's true a lot of people have profound experiences that are drug-related, it's not that way for everyone," says Janata. "You can find lots of people that into the groove purely through the music, with nothing but a bottle of water in their hands."

The study, which the public is encouraged to participate in by visiting http://tarp.ucdavis.edu, will begin over the next few weeks with Janata and his partner, Sylvan, dividing participants into four religious groups and two nonreligious groups according to their own personal music preferences.

The religious groups include a Pentecostal congregation, a Jewish synagogue, a Hindu temple and a Yoruba/West African temple. The two secular groups will be composed of aficionados of the rave/electronic dance music scene as well as the jam-band scene. Because the Grateful Dead are no more since Garcia's passing, the jam-band likely to be used for study purposes is The String Cheese Incident, a bluegrass-based group originally formed in Boulder, Colo.

From there, Janata and Sylvan will look at the memories, thoughts and emotions triggered when a person listens to both favorite music and music with no personal emotional resonance.

After that comes the neuroscience: Volunteers will have electrodes attached to their heads for electroencephalograms (EEGs), will wear special gloves that measure movements like finger tapping, and in some cases, will be given full-on body scans for functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs).

"It's really exciting for me, because in my field, it's very tough. Religious experience is an ephemeral thing that's hard to prove the validity of to a skeptical outsider," says Sylvan, the religious studies expert. "But now, here's hard science."

Then again, there's the school of rock that eschews hard science for the real thing.

"I know people who've seen literally hundreds of Dead shows and all the splinter groups and off-shoots," says Atlas, the music fan. "What's the draw? There's a connection being made. That's it. What's going on in the musicians' minds is going through their brains to their instruments to the ear of the listeners and into their minds. People are connected to the musicians, the moment and the music itself."