Hotshot bluegrass flatpicker Tony Rice joins late Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia and mandolin virtuoso David Grisman on The Pizza Tapes (April 25), a high-fidelity version of a tape that allegedly disappeared during a pizza delivery — then wound up in Deadhead tape-trading circles.

Legend has it that Garcia was given a dubbed tape of this impromptu 1993 acoustic jam session, and the tape — left out on the rock icon's kitchen counter — disappeared during a pizza delivery. While no effort has been made to track down the delivery person, Grisman said he initially was angered that copies of the tape, recorded in his home studio, wound up in Deadhead tape-trading circles — and on the Internet.

"Somebody told me one day they heard it on the radio in New York City, and I flipped out and got real upset about it, and continued to be upset for a few years, because people would bring copies of this tape up to me and ask me to sign 'em," Grisman said. "I was just like, 'No. That's stolen property.' "

Grisman eventually heard the tracks that were being distributed over the Internet.

"The stuff sounded so bad — I mean the fidelity of it — that I said, 'I gotta put this stuff out,' just so people could hear how it really sounds," Grisman said.

The Pizza Tapes — the disc itself looks like a large vegetarian pizza, the cover art of a winking chef has a pizza-box look — features Garcia, Grisman and former David Grisman Quintet guitarist Rice jamming on traditional folk tunes and a few covers, including folk-rocker Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door."

In a drawn-out jam on jazz legend Miles Davis' "So What," Grisman lays fast, tight melodies on top of the guitar lines.

A Long Relationship

The disc is the fifth release of Garcia/Grisman music from Grisman's Acoustic Disc label — and the third since Garcia's death in 1995.

Garcia, known as a bluegrass banjo player from San Francisco in his pre-Dead days, first met Grisman in 1964 at a Pennsylvania concert by the late bluegrass legend Bill Monroe.

"There were little pockets of people like us in various [cities] ... little groups of kindred spirits," Grisman said. "We all got to know each other traveling around. We'd sleep on each others' floors and stuff."

Grisman later played mandolin on the Dead classic "Ripple," on American Beauty (1970). With guitarist/vocalist Peter Rowan, fiddler Vassar Clements and bassist John Kahn, they formed the bluegrass supergroup Old and in the Way and toured in the early 1970s.

Rice helped Grisman form the David Grisman Quintet in 1975, then went on to pursue a solo career playing a similar style of jazzy, instrumental acoustic music, as well as straight, traditional bluegrass, and became one of the best-loved flatpickers on the bluegrass circuit.

Blissed-Out Jamming

The Pizza Tapes documents the first time Garcia and Rice jammed together, and the blissed-out banter included between songs highlights the guitarists' mutual admiration.

"Shit, I'm havin' a great time, man!" Garcia proclaims joyfully after a quick run through Lefty Frizzell's "Always Late." "Tony, it's a fuckin' pleasure playin' with ya, man!"

"Likewise, likewise," Rice replies.

Garcia's emotive, melancholy vocals underscore the weary lyrics of folk ballads such as the opening track, "Man of Constant Sorrow."

The three musicians noodle around the chord progression of "Shady Grove" getting acquainted as a trio before settling into the tune on a track listed as "Shady Jam" (RealAudio excerpt). Rice's fast, fluid flourishes add a new dimension to the combination, occasionally leading the group away from straight rhythms and into new improvisational territory.

Garcia and Rice go neck-for-neck on the duet "Guitar Space," a blend of Garcia's Grateful Dead psychedelia and Rice's classical-flavored chords and harmonic arpeggios, then segue into a dreamy, instrumental cover of composer George Gershwin's "Summertime."

The trio sticks mostly to old-timey acoustic material such as "Drifting Too Far From the Shore" and traditionals such as "Little Sadie" and "Rosalee McFall."

While some of the material here has been heard before — the 1998 Garcia/Grisman disc So What featured several takes on the tune, and the Dead covered "Rosalee McFall" on 1980's Reckoning — Garcia's performances of "House of the Rising Sun," "Long Black Veil" and a soulful "Amazing Grace" are rarer treats.

"It was nice to hear them sort of relaxed and improvisational and just sort of stretching out," Jeremy Pollock, 25, of Berkeley, Calif., said of the scratchy bootleg version he downloaded off the Internet. "It was just musicians playing, and then it became a performance-based recording."