For a 15-year run in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Melvin Seals was Jerry Garcia’s organ player. He was there in 1982 when Garcia recorded his last proper studio album, Run for the Roses, and he was onstage on April 23, 1995, when the Jerry Garcia Band performed its last-ever concert, a two-set affair at The Warfield in San Francisco. When Garcia passed away, Seals remained loyal to the music of his one-time bandleader, reforming the group under his own name and inviting past members to join him in what was now known as Melvin Seals & JGB.

Seals just announced a series of winter dates that keeps him and JGB on the road through March. The run kicks off Feb. 25 at, of all places, The Warfield, with appearances by original backing vocalists Jackie LaBranch and Gloria Jones, plus former Allman Brothers Band and current Dead & Company bassist Oteil Burbridge and Seals’ longtime guitarist Stu Allen. They’ll be joined by The David Nelson Band on that date—Nelson and Garcia both shared membership in New Riders of the Purple Sage for a short time in the early ‘70s. The Warfield gig is followed a string of East Coast dates that wraps March 19 at The State Theatre in State College, Pa. In between, they cover much of New England, the Mid-Atlantic and the Southeast. Details regarding the full winter run can be found at Seals’ website.

“It was controversial (at first),” Seals told the site Grateful Web earlier this year. “People would say, ‘We loved you, but this isn’t JGB.’ For a good two years, people didn’t dislike me; they just disliked what I was doing. … So I finally came up with the idea of sticking ‘Melvin Seals’ out-front of JGB. Not ever trying to live on Jerry’s thunder. It was a struggle. Not making one-third of the money we made as Jerry Garcia Band. So we called it Melvin Seals and JGB, a different identity, not trying to be the Bill Graham’s JGB. And all these years later of course none of that negative sentiment exists. We’re doing a lot of major shows.”

Seals’ headlining status at The Warfield is one indication of just how “major” the 21st-century edition of JGB has become. As Seals points out, the venue does not book as many rock bands as it did in Garcia’s heyday, when it became a home away from home for not only JGB but also the Grateful Dead, who performed 15 sold-out shows there during an acoustic-electric tour in 1980. He says it’s an “honor” to be playing there these days. At a Warfield gig earlier this year, the band blended classic Garcia songs like “Sugaree” with popular JGB covers, including Peter Rowan’s “Midnight Moonlight,” Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” and Roy Hamilton’s “Don’t Let Go,” which could stretch for more than 20 minutes under Garcia’s watch.