SPAGA are full of life on SPAGA Plays Dead.

With Aron Magner on piano and keyboards and serving as main soloist, this instrumental Grateful Dead covers LP also taps solo songbooks of Jerry Garcia on “Eep Hour” and Bob Weir with “Heaven Help the Fool,” which, along with “Cumberland Blues,” hews closest to the original of Plays Dead’s six cuts.

But even “Heaven” is deeply interpretive; jazzy with a touch of Vince Guaraldi and a reggae bridge woven into the trio rendering from Disco Biscuit/Billy’s Kid Magner, drummer Matt Scarano and bassist Jason Fraticelli.

Former RatDog/the Other Ones sax blower Dave Ellis drops in for “Estimated Prophet.” Rendered with jazzy syncopation in 7/8 time, it finds the temporary quartet splicing pieces of the original arrangement into something new. Yet, the old blueprint remains as frist Fraticelli’s bass, then Ellis’ brass trace the vocal melody over trance-like backing.

“Friend of the Devil,” on the contrary, owes less to its titular antecedent than to “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” and “Cosmic Charlie.” It’s essentially a fresh composition – before morphing into a 60-second, quadruple-time “FOTD” interlude that leads to the coda of the song and of SPD, a “Space”-heavy rendering of “Loser.”