West Coast Tape Delay

12/2/94, Davis, CA, University of California-Davis Recreation Hall

Way back in April of 1994, Phish kicked off their packed year of touring with a hometown show at the Flynn Theatre and their hometown friends the Giant Country Horns. The new six-piece GCH was both a callback to the past — the July 1991 horns tour, primarily — and an attempt to do live justice to songs from Hoist that utilized the famous Tower of Power. In their two April appearances, as well as a hybrid “Cosmic” varietal that showed up in New Orleans in May, the brass fit well with the “mature” Phish of Spring 1994, promoting the hell out of Hoist and playing it relatively straight, by their standards. 

When the Country Horns return in December 1994, that’s less the case. Eight months down the road, Phish is doing things that they couldn’t — or at least wouldn’t dare — do when their touring year began. So while the horns shows in spring felt like a nice change of pace from the standard show format of the time, this extended sit-in feels like an intrusion, a regression back to safe territory instead of a chance to further iterate on what they started constructing in the Summer and Fall. 

Which begs the question: why bring back the horns at this point, for back-to-back shows in secondary Northern California markets? The obvious answer is they wanted to book some songs with brass for the live album taking shape, which paid off through tonight’s Gumbo. Or maybe they wanted to add some extra sauce to sell tickets on the West Coast; this is also one of three December shows that draft in DMB as openers, at a time when Under The Table And Dreaming was just about to pop. (As underwhelmed as I am by the horns set, at least there’s no DMB superjam).

Regardless of the reasoning, the main downer is that the Country Horns appearance is almost a clone of their first round of sit-ins. The 5/4 and 12/2 sets share six songs in common; Magilla is swapped for Gumbo, and Wolfman’s, poor Wolfman’s, remains in hibernation. Instead of coming in at the end of YEM, the horns make their entrance for the end of Bowie, and while Bowie has 22 luxurious minutes to explore beforehand, it’s still a bit of a buzzkill after the hefty versions of November and the fluid, unpredictable sets of the last two nights. 

Obviously, you can’t exactly wing it when you’re playing with five guest musicians. But it’s still a bummer that they stick to the most obvious Phish + Horns material: bar-rockers Suzy and Cavern, Phish jazz standards The Landlady and Caravan, and the swingier Hoist arrangement of Julius. Only the Bowie ending and Buried Alive provide a taste of the demented jazz-prog arrangements on display in Summer 1991, horn parts grafted onto already-dense Anastasio compositions in variably successful but never boring fashion.

Compounding that disappointment is the unrealized talent in the horn section this time around. 12/2 is the second appearance of the “Cosmic” Country Horns — despite Trey introducing them as plain old Giant two times in this show — so named because of Cosmic Krewe leader Michael Ray’s involvement. Ray is Phish’s most direct link back to Trey’s idol Sun Ra, and can certainly play much stranger music than he’s given to work with here. Trombonist James Harvey would go on to participate in Trey’s free jazz Surrender to the Air project, and utilityman Peter Apfelbaum led The Hieroglyphics Ensemble, which brought global and modern classical influences into the big band jazz format. 

Given that the marathon jams of November found Phish testing their deepest avant-garde, even free improv, impulses, one can easily imagine doing a lot more than the old Suzy fanfare with these esteemed players. Only Duke Ellington’s Caravan captures a whiff of Arkestra vibes, and even there the December version is much less exploratory than its leisurely May rendition. Bring Ray and colleagues out in the middle of the Bowie jam, say in that weird twilight zone where the vacuum jam happened on 11/26, and something magical could have happened. Instead, the return of the Cosmic Country Horns is both a missed opportunity and a rerun, tape-delayed for West Coast viewers.