Fifty years on, Jerry Garcia’s Reflections gets a remaster and an expansion and, upon reflection, it’s an important LP.

All of the eight songs – “Might as Well,” “It Must Have Been the Roses,” “I’ll Take a Melody” and “Catfish John” among them – entered the Grateful Dead or Jerry Garcia Band repertoires; “They Love Each Other” and “Mission in the Rain” were played by both groups. And while the remaster is nice, it’s the bonus live and studio tracks that make this a winner.

Taken together, the studio tracks – previously released on the 2004 All Good Things boxset – and the previously unavailable live recordings, dating to 1975 and ’76, illustrate the re-emergence of the Grateful Dead after a hiatus and the emergence of the Jerry Garcia Band.

The first JGB featured Garcia, his Dead bandmates Keith (piano) and Donna Jean (vocals) Godchaux, bassist John Kahn and drummer Ron Tutt. Together, they play four Reflections songs – “Mission” (10/17/75) “Catfish John” and “Tore up over You” (2/25/76) and “TLEO” (11/12/76) – prove themselves already a band and leave the listener to hope for full-show recordings from a group that did not allow audience taping.

Of the All Good studio tracks, the 17-minute instrumental “Orpheus” is the most notable as the Grateful Dead work up the experiment sound that featured on 1975’s Blues for Allah LP. Elsewhere, the Reflections band, including the aforementioned JGB lineup without Keith Godchaux and with Nicky Hopkins and Larry Knechtel sharing keyboard duties, play “Mystery Train” and “All by Myself,” both uptempo and full of steam, before Garcia looks back to the early ’70s in recalling the Dead’s arrangement of “You Win Again” and forward to 1980 with a plugged-in rendition of “Oh, Bobe it Ain’t No Lie” that previews the Gratefuls’ acoustic presentation that was to come.