Jay Lane starts the band Jayski and the Dawn to funk up the Dead

Jay Lane has a new band and a date to launch it. Jayski and the Dawn make their official debut on Friday 20 November at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, playing funk arrangements of material from the Grateful Dead and from Bob Weir's solo catalogue.

The one confirmed collaborator is the saxophonist Dave Ellis. JamBase reports that Lane will be joined by Ellis and by additional Bay Area musicians whose names have not been announced, and that the organisers have teased unspecified guests for the night.

There is already a recording of what the band sound like, because they played once before the announcement. Lane previewed the project on 10 July at the late-night Hoarse Chorale stage at the Oregon Country Fair, and posted footage from the set to his own Instagram and Facebook pages.

That configuration was a six-piece. Lane played drums and sang, Ellis took saxophone and vocals, Miles Blackwell played bass, Oliver Tuttle trombone, Jordan Feinstein keyboards and Dan Lebowitz guitar, with Feinstein and Lebowitz also singing. JamBase is careful to say there is no confirmation the same lineup turns up in San Francisco.

What they played gives a sense of the remit. Lane has said the Oregon set included a mashup pairing Prince's Let's Go Crazy with Big River, the Johnny Cash song that became a fixture of the Grateful Dead's live sets, and that more mashups and original material are coming.

Lane and Ellis have known each other since they were teenagers at Cazadero Music Camp in Northern California. They played together in the Charlie Hunter Trio and later in RatDog, where Ellis was a member of the Weir-led band through the late 1990s and where Lane spent much of his career.

Lane's own connection to Weir goes back to the mid-1990s, starting with a trio alongside the bassist Rob Wasserman that turned into RatDog. He went on to play with Weir in Scaring the Children, Furthur and Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, and took part in an all-star tribute to Weir at the Oregon Country Fair in July.

He has also been inside the main Grateful Dead operation. After substituting for Bill Kreutzmann at some Dead & Company shows in 2021 and 2022, Lane joined the band for its 2023 final tour, played all of the Sphere residency in Las Vegas and the three 60th-anniversary concerts at Golden Gate Park in August 2025.

His work outside that world is just as long. Lane briefly played with Primus in 1988, returned from 2010 to 2013, and has worked with Les Claypool on Sausage and Colonel Claypool's Fearless Flying Frog Brigade, which is where the funk instincts behind this band come from. Ellis was a member of the 1998 edition of The Other Ones alongside Weir, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart and Bruce Hornsby.

Tickets for the Great American Music Hall debut are already on sale. Our rock coverage of that circle includes John Mayer saying he has not sworn off Grateful Dead music for good, and Claypool is in the news this week too, recording a new theme for the renamed South Park.