Alumni News

by April White

It’s a metaphor that operates on many levels. There’s the voyage from struggling jazz musician to jam-band icon (Oteil earned two Grammys for his work with the legendary Allman Brothers Band before joining the stadium-filling Grateful Dead revival band Dead & Company); the pilgrimage from religious skeptic to deeply spiritual student of theology and mysticism; and the odyssey from autodidact and itinerant musician to respected teacher and doting parent.

But when the 60-year-old Oteil describes his life thus far, he manages to transform a series of what he calls “left turns” into a narrative of passion and purpose that is as coherent as one of his lyrical bass solos.

Oteil grew up in Washington, DC, in a home filled with music—much like the house he now shares in Boca Raton, Florida, with his wife, Jess, and their children, Nigel and Kavi. His father was an amateur flutist with a massive record collection, and both parents saw music- making as one of many useful activities (sports, dance, painting) for keeping their four kids off the streets and out of trouble.

Burbridge, for example, was a child actor who appeared in the Peter Sellers film Being There the same year he graduated from The Potomac School. (The School only ran to ninth grade at the time, and being separated from his Potomac friends proved traumatic. “It took me decades to get over it,” he says.)

But music was always his principal passion. He recalls playing the drums at age five, though his older brother, the late Kofi Burbridge ’76—a flutist and keyboardist who often worked with Oteil before passing away in 2017— once told an interviewer that Oteil was already tapping out rhythms on a Quaker oatmeal box by the age of three or four. At age 14, he switched to the bass, carrying with him the rhythmic finesse he had developed as a drummer.

By then, Kofi was attending a music conservatory—a path that Oteil wasn’t eager to follow, despite his parents’ insistence that he either go to college or get a job. Instead, Oteil persuaded them to accept a third alternative: moving in with a high school friend and practicing bass eight hours a day. “That’s where I got it all together,” he says.

After playing the DC club circuit for a while, Oteil moved to Virginia Beach to join a top-40 cover band, then relocated to Atlanta to see if he could make a living playing his preferred music, the jazz fusion pioneered by Miles Davis in the 1960s and refined by his former sidemen in groups like Weather Report and Return to Forever.

Alas, he could not. “Unless you played with Miles, you couldn’t make money doing that,” Oteil says. “I was just starving.”

Disillusionment gave way to hope, however, when he met Col. Bruce Hampton, an eccentric guitarist with a taste for wildly eclectic improvised music. With a background that encompassed everything from jazz and funk to pop and Latin, Oteil fit right into Hampton’s inclusive musical vision, and together with several other like-minded players, they formed the Aquarium Rescue Unit (ARU).

“It was the Island of Misfit Toys,” Oteil says of the group’s radically diverse makeup, which he credits with furthering his education in gospel, blues, and country music—an education that would later help him gain entry to the Allman Brothers and Dead & Company. “You need all of that for both bands,” he says.

The ARU was no more commercially successful than Burbridge’s fusion efforts, though. “The only people who came to see Col. Bruce were hippies and freaks,” Oteil says with an affectionate chuckle. But it became a cult favorite with other genre-defying jam bands, and in 1992, a group of ARU admirers—including Phish, Blues Traveler, and the Spin Doctors—invited the band to accompany them on the groundbreaking H.O.R.D.E. (Horizons of Rock Developing Everywhere) alt- rock tour, raising Burbridge’s profile and changing his trajectory.

By the late 1990s, Burbridge’s improvisatory skills and mastery of a wide range of styles had won him the bass chair in the Allman Brothers Band. His growing fame also allowed him to launch his own jazz fusion outfit, Oteil & the Peacemakers, with Kofi sometimes sitting in on flute and keyboards.

In 2010, guitarist Derek Trucks, who had worked with Oteil and Kofi in various settings, invited both Burbridges to join the Tedeschi Trucks Band, a blues-rock outfit with a large following on the jam-band scene. By the time the former Grateful Dead bandmates Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, and Bob Weir decided to establish Dead & Company in 2015, it seemed only natural to have Oteil play the role of the late bassist Phil Lesh, who was pursuing his own projects.

Despite years of high-profile gigs, however, standing in for a founding member of one of the most famous bands on the planet was still intimidating. “It’s hard when you replace someone that has been Mount Rushmore’d, especially when they’re still alive,” Oteil says. Yet even the most diehard Deadheads soon embraced Oteil for his ability to match the band’s signature sound and feeling. “I love that this scene is so inclusive,” Oteil says. “Come one, come all!”

Oteil has since played hundreds of Dead & Company shows for millions of fans. And while he has reduced his touring schedule to spend more time with his kids, he is hardly standing still: In addition to leading his own ensemble, Oteil & Friends, and sitting in with various other bands, he’ll be doing a residency with Dead & Company at the Sphere in Las Vegas this spring, joining the Boston Pops for a 60th anniversary celebration of the Grateful Dead this summer, and playing a couple of nights with The Brothers, an Allman Brothers tribute band, at Madison Square Garden in between.

Even as his career was taking off in the late ’90s, however, Oteil experienced a personal crisis precipitated by the hard-driving lifestyle of a touring musician. “I heard these voices talking to me, and they said, ‘You gotta stop what you’re doing,’” he recalls.

For Oteil, that meant delving into faith and spirituality—an unexpected turn, given the profoundly skeptical attitude toward religion he’d inherited from his father. “My dad was deeply scarred by religion and rejected it,” he says.

At the time, Oteil was living in Birmingham, Alabama, and a member of his church introduced him to James Barnett, a Southern Baptist theologian with a progressive streak and a taste for the Allman Brothers. The two became close, and under Barnett’s guidance, Oteil conducted a line-by-line exegesis of the Bible that led him to develop a spiritual philosophy that was as inclusive as his attitude toward music: a philosophy grounded in love, the unity of humankind, and an openness to all expressions of the numinous, from music and mysticism to mythology
and magic.

Oteil’s spiritual awakening also deepened his belief in music as a means of healing the soul. Since 2017, he has lost a staggering number of loved ones, including Kofi, Hampton, and Barnett. In response, he recorded A Lovely View of Heaven, an album of Grateful Dead ballads, in 2023. The act of working through a body of songs that dealt with loss and longing helped Oteil process his grief, and he hopes the recording will help others do the same.

“If my intention moves through these sound waves, and I take my pain and I move it out—something happens in that process that hits a nerve in people, and now we’re all healing each other,” he says.

The same urge to aid others also led Oteil to overcome his longstanding reluctance to teach. “I never went to music school, so I felt weird about teaching, because I might show you something that’s wrong,” he says. People kept asking him for lessons, however, so he finally capitulated and began teaching his unique method for learning the bass, which includes instruction in harmony, rhythm, and even philosophy. In a similar vein, he has for many years served as a counselor and teacher at Roots Rock Revival, a summer music camp in upstate New York.

To spread his positive message to an even broader audience, Oteil also launched a podcast, Comes a Time, with comedian Mike Finoia. Oteil appeared as a guest on Finoia’s own podcast prior to the pandemic, and after discovering that Finoia had also experienced a spiritual awakening, he proposed that they co-host a program. Their conversations range widely, as does their guest list, which veers from artists and athletes to clerics and scientists. But they always return to the core topics of love, spirit, family, and connection. 

For Oteil, the podcast has become one more way to share the personal philosophy that suffuses every aspect of his life, including the music that has sustained him since childhood.

“It’s evangelizing,” he admits. “But I’m not trying to convert anybody to any specific dogma other than love, magic, and kindness.”

Read more stories from The Term.