Rainforest Band

The Rainforest Band is a jam band that spans several genres, including jazz, rock, world music, R&B, and funk. Founded in 1990, it produced four albums and performed for ten years.

The Rainforest Band began in 1990 with the Grammy-nominated album Blues From the Rainforest, a collaboration between jazz keyboardist Merl Saunders, percussionist Muruga Booker, and Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, with Shakti Booker (vocals), Eddie Moore (percussion), Melvin Seals (sound effects) and Bill Thompson (drum & sampled sound midi-technician). This fusion of world music and jazz was an early hit in a genre which became a category for the Grammys that same year. The music itself was written by Saunders and Booker, and Garcia added tracks both with electric guitar and MIDI-guitar mimicking flute, and sampled sounds from the Amazonian rainforest were incorporated into the music throughout.

Although the album was billed as a Merl Saunders album, in the tour that followed the group was billed as The Rainforest Band, and the album is generally regarded as the first release of the band. For the next ten years they played with an ever-changing line-up of musicians, many from the Grateful Dead family of musicians. They were a favorite Earth Day act; one of their albums was called Save the Planet So We’ll Have Someplace to Boogie, and a familiar chant at performances was “Every Day is Earth Day”.

Their albums were produced by Sumertone Records, Merl Saunders’ label, and a portion of the proceeds went to the Rainforest Action Network. In 1999 a DVD of Blues From the Rainforest was released, containing the entire album from the original masters, concert footage of their September 24, 1990 performance at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, a music video of the title track, and the documentary Rediscovering the Amazon, chronicling Saunders’ trip to the Amazonian rainforest and showcasing the issue of rainforest destruction.

...
Wikipedia