The greatest cliché in Grateful Dead writing is to call anything a “transition period,” and yet, the newest release from the Jerry Garcia archives captures exactly that in the form of Garcia’s first shows with Elvis Presley drummer Ron Tutt in December 1974. It is a new group with—as of that very week—a new name, Legion Of Mary. The quintet, steady Jerry comrades John Kahn on bass and Merl Saunders on organ, plus saxophonist/flautist Martin Fierro, dives headlong into intricate and intimate space fusion. Garcia tenderly bombs across the rich changes of Eddie Harris’ “Freedom Jazz Dance” and out into the great wide open, where he belongs. Only two of the 13 tracks are under 10 minutes, and both are versions of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Saunders’ celestial Rhodes and Tutt’s spacious grooves give Garcia a supportive vessel for the transmogrification of boogie-bar R&B into quizzical prisms. He finds wormholes anywhere he wanders, cracking Stevie Wonder’s brand new single “Boogie on Reggae Woman” into quietly glistening rainbows. And yet, it’s not a transition at all, the music hanging lazy and loose, a continuation of a conversation begun a while back with no particular place to go.