Style Transfer
SET 1: AC/DC Bag, Cars Trucks Buses, Kung > Free, Sparkle > Stash -> Catapult, Acoustic Army, It's Ice > Tela, Runaway Jim
SET 2: Reba, Rift, You Enjoy Myself, Hello My Baby, Scent of a Mule, Cavern
ENCORE: A Day in the Life
By 1995, Phish was already pretty aloof from the jamband scene. They’d always kept it at arm’s length, only joining HORDE for a few select dates and rarely sharing their bill with others as they ploughed their own path. And despite guest appearances in the summer by members of Blues Traveler and Dave Matthews Band, that gap only widened this year, as those bands found the radio success that Phish had briefly chased and abandoned. There were no hard feelings, and there are still a few isolated sit-ins from John Popper, LeRoi Moore, or Bela Fleck to come, but for the most part those jamband crossovers are finished by Fall 95 as Phish enters their very own sphere.
Instead they looked outside of the jamband world to the New York City jazz scene for inspiration and collaboration. In 1995, Medeski, Martin & Wood were still primarily denizens of Lower East Side clubs like Village Gate and The Knitting Factory, with three albums under their belt but still a year away from their breakthrough, Shack-man. When Phish and MMW crossed paths in Austin, Phish played two sold-out nights at the 2600-capacity Austin Music Hall while MMW played the White Rabbit and Emo’s clubs in Austin’s music district. At that point, you were more likely to read about them in Downbeat than Relix.
Ironically, Phish themselves may be responsible for the assimilation of MMW into the jammy ranks. Trey endorsed them in the early fall 95 Schvice (“Music that makes me want to drive too fast”), and though they had done a few HORDE dates that summer, this week’s intersections — a sit-in tonight, and a very rare opening slot in New Orleans — were massive in boosting their profile. Tapes spread fast of both this YEMMW and Trey’s three-song guest spot later that night at Emo’s, a popular tape filler that gave the trio invaluable blanks-and-postage word-of-mouth.
But if Phish gave MMW a commercial boost, the artistic mentorship went the other direction. Trey and Medeski crossed paths earlier that year in the recording of Surrender to the Air, Trey’s free-jazz project that wouldn’t come out until early 1996. The parallels between the two musicians’ main gigs were probably obvious, as MMW was another band that sublimated heady intellectual training (from the New England Conservatory of Music and Manhattan School of Music) into music for the body and the masses.
However, Trey, if not the whole band, were likely fascinated by MMW building out their sound from a foundation of jazz, rather than the prog-rock at Phish’s core. Phish had dabbled in jazz since their earliest days, but gave up on it as the venues got bigger — the last Take The A-Train is April 94, the last Caravan (aside from one odd appearance in 96) was December of last year. You could argue that the improvisational principles of jazz were still present, baked into Phish’s collective DNA, but the mode of jazz as played by MMW — where songs squeeze a lot of exploration from a pretty standard head > improv > head structure — may have appealed to a group with much fussier material.
But at this stage, MMW was hardly a traditional jazz group; in fact, they sounded more like The Meters than the Bill Evans Trio. Just before “Chubb Sub,” Trey’s final song at Emo’s, Billy Martin raps that the crowd should “make room for the dancers up front,” not the sort of command you usually hear at the jazz club. Their focus on groove and funk-style collective improvisation, with the occasional spiral off into heavy dissonance and free playing, sets the template for Phish’s 1997 reinvention and even some specific features, with Medeski’s raunchy clavinet tone soon to be a crucial part of Page’s arsenal and the “lead bass” role of Chris Wood predicting the Louder Mike the People demanded. And even without a guitarist, MMW somehow manages to influence Trey — the skronky, rhythm-focused approach he takes during his Emo’s sit-in is totally unlike his 95 sound, and much closer to the tone he would develop from 97-2000 and into 2.0.
A 1995 You Enjoy Myself is the ideal meeting ground for these bands and styles. After the trampolines are removed, MMW takes their place: Medeski joining Page at his rig, Wood playing Mike’s weird one-string upright bass last seen in Fall 94, and Martin knocking Fishman off his drum kit. Fish takes up the vacuum and plays some very theremin-style parts before switching to trombone, and, most oddly, Phish bus driver Dominic Placco joins in with very passable trumpet. From the starting point of the standard YEM groove, it builds in intensity, constantly threatening to succumb to chaos a la the almost-unlistenable You Enjoy Myself with Aquarium Rescue Unit on 5/5/93.
But it doesn’t, perhaps thanks to the steady hand of Martin, who is used to bringing his own band back from the free-jazz brink to the safe waters of a groove. For the final ten minutes, the impromptu octet settles into improvisation that no longer resembles YEM, and honestly sounds closer to something you’d hear in an MMW set than a Phish set in 1995, thanks to Wood’s upright bass slides and Medeski twisting Page’s keyboards into his much more aggressive style. The friendly takeover simultaneously signifies both the guests’ confidence and the hosts’ respect — Phish is excited and eager to learn from a band they consider peers, even if it means yielding the floor for 20 minutes of tonight’s set (and roughly half(!) of their set in New Orleans in three days).
I don’t think you can overstate the importance of these collaborations for the rest of the tour and beyond; the timing is just too perfect. As we’ve discussed, Phish could’ve easily leaned into the New Dead angle and coasted, or followed their jammy associates into chasing an alternative rock crossover. Instead, they gave a little-known trio a hefty share of the spotlight in exchange for inspiration, finding a recipe for combining the avant-garde experiments of the summer with more danceable packaging that would fuel at least the next five years. Not a bad deal, for both bands.