There Are Other Worlds
Surrender to the Air, 4/1 & 4/2/96, New York, NY, The Academy
Surrender to the Air wasn’t an April Fool’s gag. But for a lot of Phish fans who bought the record in March 1996 or attended one of the short-lived ensemble’s two NYC shows in April, it may have felt like they were on the outside of an in-joke. The first Phish Universe release after the breakthrough of A Live One and the triumphs of Fall 1995, Surrender to the Air was a blast of the unfamiliar — a dense, free jazz skronkfest that sounded like garbled alien transmissions to anyone expecting the pure emotional climax of a Hood jam. Even if half of Phish were present and some other familiar jam scene names appeared on the roster, it was an intimidating and befuddling listen, not least to your then-16-year-old author.
But from a safe distance, Surrender to the Air feels like a skeleton key to some of the pubertal changes that Phish was undergoing. The album, recorded way back in spring of 1995, puts some weight behind Trey’s ambitious early 1995 “Sun Ra meets Velvet Underground” goal that I often quoted last year. The loose structure and minimal compromise of the music is belated foreshadowing for the dissonant intensity of Summer 95, or the extended ensemble jams with MMW in October. And while it doesn’t feel of a kind with the relatively “safe” year of 1996 that we’re about to explore, it does predict some of the changes that will unfold in 1997 and the years following.
To back up, Surrender to the Air is first and foremost Phish — or at least Trey and Fish — spending some hard-earned clout after finally shifting units for Elektra. Arguably, getting the label to put out Crimes of the Mind in late 1994 was the first withdrawal the band made, but while that record was paying back favors to an old Vermont friend, Surrender to the Air was pure fantasy camp on the record company dime. The lineup was a wishlist of dream collaborators, drawing from Arkestra personnel Marshall Allen, Michael Ray, and Damon Choice, Wetlandsverse compatriots John Medeski and Burbridges Oteil and Kofi, Tom Waits/John Zorn sideman Marc Ribot, and the jazz faculty pedigree of Bob Gullotti and James Harvey.
The first group of musicians is probably the most significant, given Phish’s well-documented obsession with Sun Ra. Based purely on a musical comparison, it might be a perplexing influence — in his hundreds of recordings, Ra never made music that sounded like a Tweezer, and Phish had largely abandoned their occasional jazz dabblings by the end of 1994. But philosophically, the framework of Ra’s approach feels very simpatico with the worldview of Phish, as Trey described in a 1996 interview with The Music Monitor:
"A lot of times, I think he was the pinnacle. He was as good as it got. His values remained pure for his entire life, and there's something to be said for that. When you listen to what he was saying, it was so right on the ball. I mean, somebody show me something he said that wasn't 100% true. He said, 'People don't understand that music is a spiritual language, and what you say musically goes straight to the throne of the Creator of the Universe. So you have to be careful about what you say.' You get caught up in commercialism and money or something like that, and what are you doing for your spirit? You're not doing anything, and music is a spiritual language and it should be respected as that.”
The tone of the Surrender to the Air album is also closer to Sun Ra’s catalog than any of the other contributors, even if it lacks the compositional control of the late bandleader. "It was very loose. Everybody was just set up in the room, and you'd just come and go as you please. Sometimes it broke down to just two people. Most of the session was spent doing free stuff,” Trey recalled. And it sounds like it, with tracks merely marking tonal shifts in an otherwise continuous (though clearly edited) 49-minute suite.
The shows at the Academy continue that approach, with two setlists that merely read “Set 1: Jam. Set 2: Jam.” on phish.net. There are occasional hints of the themes worked out on the album sessions, but for the most part it’s a blank-slate experiment: get an undecet of talented musicians on stage and see what happens. Personally, I think the live shows have much more to offer than the studio recording, even if they are equally heavy lifting. You can watch night 1 here and night 2 here; they’re both totally unique nights of longform improv.
Despite my best attempts at studying Arkeology (including reading John Szwed’s excellent biography Space is the Place this past summer), I’m not qualified to judge Surrender to the Air on a jazz criticism basis. But from a Phish Scholar perspective, the shows hold a lot of intriguing signposts for the dead air between the creative peak of 1995 and the...water-treading of 1996.
Most notably, the benefit of fan-shot video provides an insightful window into Trey as bandleader, a role that is somewhat hard to discern on the audio evidence of Surrender to the Air. Surrounded by musicians that he respects, Trey remains in charge, using hand signals to conduct the flow of jams, or providing thematic platforms for the other musicians to build on. In Phish to this point, his leadership largely stems from writing most of the songs and picking the setlist; here is the beginning of a more demonstrative piloting.
And yet, his playing is not flashy or overbearing, a particularly jarring shift on the heels of his Guitar God spell in Fall 1995. Perhaps in deference to playing with another guitarist (Ribot) or within a larger ensemble, he rarely takes traditional leads at all, focusing almost entirely on rhythm parts or texture. As a result, these shows provide a more concrete premonition of the significant evolution of Phish in 1997 than almost anything that band will play in 1996 — check out the 1 hour, 25-minute mark of 4/1 for a particularly Talking Heads section, or the cowfunk jam starting around 36 minutes into 4/2. There’s also future hints of Trey sitting back by playing keyboards (!) and launching some Ghost-esque bweeooos 11 minutes into 4/2.
With no shade intended towards the other members of Phish, perhaps immersing himself with musicians he idolized helped Trey find a new humility and balance between leadership and democracy. In the 1996 interview, he even talks about how he assembled the group in language that sounds like a prelude to the next era of Phish:
"Part of what I thought when I contacted the people I wanted to play is that they're all people who aren't gonna turn this thing into some kind of solo wankfest. Everybody's into the group sound. They say a lot more by being supportive rather than by showing off how good their chops are."
By contrast, Fishman is almost too demure in the two April performances, perhaps humbled by the experienced jazz pro on the kit to his right or thrown off by a rare-for-the-time public appearance wearing pants. Page’s cameo for the second set of the second night is similarly underwhelming, as he sidles about the stage’s spare keyboards for the most noisy and shapeless set of the run. Mike? Well, I guess he had other things to do that week.
In fact, the whole band did — at this point in time, they’re supposed to be upstate in Bearsville recording the next Phish studio album, but April was a halftime break. The first phase of recording Billy Breathes traced some of the same steps as Surrender to the Air; instead of concentrating on pre-written material, the band jammed in studio to create “the blob,” a sonic collage of ideas that could later be whittled down into tracks. “We’re trying to keep these open-eared goals in mind,” Trey told Billboard, “We’re doing a lot of weird, pretty cool things.” That idea was mostly abandoned when the band borrowed Steve Lillywhite from their pals in DMB for the second half of the Billy Breathes sessions, but in another delayed payoff, would help make the next batch of songs and the following LP one of Phish’s strongest.
So while the Surrender to the Air project had the lifespan of a mayfly, likely due to the busy schedules of all personnel involved, and made music that proved alienating to most of Phish fandom, its footprint in Phish’s evolution is surprisingly large. Certainly, it tested one extreme of Trey’s improvisational goals, an outer region that became incompatible with his crowd-pleasing personality and more traditional solo project priorities. But buried within the dense slab of music the ensemble produced over two nights in 1996 are the seeds of where Phish would go next, after the coming year of indecisiveness.