Grammy Award-winning Eric Krasno is ready to join jam band Aiko for its 40th anniversary concerts July 4 and July 6 in Park City. (See story on B-1).

This will be the first time the guitarist and producer, known for his work with Soulive, Lettuce, Tedeschi Trucks Band and Pretty Lights, has ever collaborated with the Grateful Dead cover band, whose lineup includes Parkite Ben Anderson.

“It’s great, and it’s exciting because Aiko has been doing this for a very long time,” said Krasno, who has also performed with Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh in the band Phil Lesh and Friends. “Ben is also a good friend, and he brings such a great energy to everything.”

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Collaborating with bands such as Aiko and others is a big part of Krasno’s career.

The music is kind of becoming a ‘reel book’ in terms of having these songs with certain structures that allow you to do what we want with them.” Eric Krasno, multi-award-winning singer, producer and podcaster

“I enjoy working with different people because I get to play so many different types of music,” he said. “It’s kind of the same thing I do with producing. And as a fan of music, I came up listening to so many different types of music, you know? Jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin and (Jimi) Hendrix. So I’ve never been a singular type of creator.”

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Working with other artists is also an excuse to try out different things and collaborate with people whom Krasno loves and respects.

“It just keeps things interesting,” he said. “I love being in a band, but if you’re in one band all the time, it gets boring. And this fixes that.”

During the July show at Canyons Village during the 2024 Forum Fest, Krasno will get the change to perform with Aiko — featuring founding members Anderson and drummer Ross Mason, along with guitarist Steve Krafft, keyboardists Scott Fernandez and Ben Anderson II and vocalists Michelle Yahn and Jessie Krafft. And he will also get to jam with guest horn players — saxophonist Brad Walker, trombonist Alex Wasily and John Michael Bradford — and another friend, singer and songwriter Anders Osborne.

“I love working with Alex, Brad and John,” he said. “I’ve played with them at the Jazz Festival in New Orleans, and they are amazing horn players and arrangers. Then Anders Osborne is also going to be there. So this is just a great collection of people.”

On July 6, Krasno will play in a trio, featuring drummer Stanton Moore and keyboardist Wil Blades, that is slated to open for Aiko at the Marquis.

“Playing with different musicians always ups my game,” he said. “I play a lot with Phil Lesh and Friends, so it’s kind of the same situation. There are a lot of collaborators on stage because the band changes all the time.”

Krasno enjoys playing Grateful Dead songs because of their versatility.

“The music is kind of becoming a ‘reel book’ in terms of having these songs with certain structures that allow you to do what we want with them,” he said. “People have different interpretations of them, and adding the horns gives them a whole different flavor.”

Krasno learned how to approach the Grateful Dead’s music from different aspects while playing with Phil Lesh and Friends.

“With Phil, his attitude is to wrangle it, mess with it and do anything you want to with it because it’s more group improvisation versus each soloist being put on a pedestal,” he said. “That took me a while to grasp during my first run with him because all the other bands I was in had guitar solos and sax solos. But with him you find peaks and valleys as an ensemble.”

Krasno, whose current favorite Grateful Dead songs are “Brown-Eyed Women” and “Ship of Fools,”  was also taken aback at Lesh’s response when something would go “wrong.”

“When I was first playing with him, I would look to him to make sure I was playing the parts right,” Krasno said with a laugh. “If I nailed those it was fine, but if I hit a wrong note, he’d be like, ‘Oh, yeah!’ He liked when we would mess it up just to see where it would take us because he wanted to explore new territory. Sometimes that would come naturally because Phil will give us a huge list of songs to learn but not a lot of time to learn the exact parts.”

Still, while pushing the boundaries of a Grateful Dead tune, Krasno also remembers the fans who want to hear the lyrics and the melodies a certain way. 

“That’s why for me it’s a balance between knowing how it was originally played and flourishing from there,” he said. “But it’s not just bulldozing in.”

Krasno was 12 when he saw his first Grateful Dead concert.

“I saw them quite a bit because my older brother was and is a Deadhead,” he said. “My parents would let him bring me to shows because he was 6 years older than me.”

When Krasno decided to become a musician and went to music school, he discovered jazz, funk and rhythm and blues.

“As I circled back to the Grateful Dead after that, I realized how much their music was inspired by those things,” he said. “So, it came full circle when I had to learn all of the music to play with Phil, Bobby (Weir) and Bill (Kreutzmann), and that gave me the ability to zoom out and hear the music as a whole. It’s been a cool journey.”