Fluidity, Complexity
This week’s Tahoe Tweezer might seem unprecedented, but it’s not — not by a long shot. Phish have been playing at or near their current level for a couple of years now, deepening their music every tour to be sure, but exploring ground that they broke in 2010 and 2011.
I’d like to briefly discuss one aspect of their ‘3.0'-era improvisation, and try to explain what (to me) makes it so compelling, and marks it as a major achievement for Phish. I’ll focus on the Tahoe Tweezer, though, because it’ll give me an excuse to listen to it again.
I’ve written at length on my own blog about one of the key features of the band’s new music — an easygoing polytonality that, along with more democratic onstage leadership, that opened them up to new sounds. This post distills and extends that one.
Harmonic homebase
Phish’s improvisations generally follow one of two structural templates: conventional chord changes (Foam, Sample, Julius, Slave, Hood, YEM) or more loosely suggested, ‘thinner’ chord/scale structures with or without harmonic destinations (Antelope, Split, Bowie, Free, Ghost, Tweezer, Reba). The former group sometimes yields free-flowing explorations; the latter can produce easily-grasped conventional changes. The point is, tunes like Tweezer and Ghost give the band a lot of freedom to define a new harmonic space right at the start of the jam, but Foam is Foam and Slave is Slave. Page has a lot of control over the looser structures; he can decide when (and how hard) to hit the IIb and IV chords in Weekapaug, and his organ washes point the band toward the climax of Mike’s and YEM. And Tweezer and Ghost can take any form as they roll along — their structures are loose enough to accommodate a wide variety of harmonic/rhythmic approaches.
The thing is, if you gave Phish enough harmonic rope in the early 90s they’d inevitably start tying themselves in knots. It was awesome (literally at times) but it was decidedly special interest, if you catch my meaning. They were still an experimental band back then, in the conventional sense of the term. 1994 is a glory year for Phish’s improvisation, but they were still a ‘one new idea per minute’ band in those days. They’d change keys over and over during a long jam…along with tempo, rhythmic feel, meter, genre…it gets tiring sometimes, listening to early-90s Phish. They attained virtuosity before they got wisdom.
For me, one defining feature of their new music is that they regularly achieve harmonic freedom without also shattering the form of the music — transitions between ‘movements’ in a jam might be noticed only after the fact, as the band slyly modulates, not all on a dime as in their youthful heyday, but each in their own time, each appreciative of what the others are doing. Not Trey’s Army anymore, but a flock of birds.
They’re willing to move the harmony around, decentering and recentering the jam — that is, retraining their/our ears — without making a show of it. It’s not a big deal, now, when Stash or Split cools out into a relative major; that’s just one of the things they now do, seemingly without effort.
So take a look at Mike Hamad’s harmonic map of the Tahoe Tweezer:
In 33ish minutes of improvisation, we head from ‘harmonic homebase’ (dirty blues in A, pretty much) through a transitional passage that folds the Tweezer rhythm into a new harmonic space. E minor relates to its relative major key of G — the two colours of the ‘deconstructing’ passage — the same way the basic Tweezer soundstuff relates to the effervescent C major ambient jam that follows.
As the ambient jam builds in intensity (the 14th minute of the SBD), Trey finds the blues-rock sound again, and C major sours to C minor. The harmonic material stays the same, now, as the rhythm alters dramatically — from angry rock to eerie space — and while they’re in ambientville (‘arpeggios’ on the map), Page suggests a modulation to F. That just happens, easy as lying.
It often falls to the bassist to ‘ratify’ a modulation by giving the audience a single note around which to recenter their hearing. These days Mike does this so smoothly and easily that you almost don’t notice it. But you feel it. A sonic weight just…lifts, somehow.
As for Fish, it’s hard to imagine another drummer responding more smoothly to the other players than he does here. More quickly, sure; Fish is so rhythmically tight that he sometimes has a hard time shifting gears mid-groove. But there isn’t a single jarring transition from the drum riser in this whole jam.
The rest of the performance stays in the vicinity of C, with a fantastic three-chord ‘outro’ jam (C-Eb-F-C, though remember that the invisible ‘fourth chord’ is really the coil/uncoil action between the two iterations of C). Then Trey just starts playing the Tweezer riff in A blues (not quite major nor minor) to signal the closing. This isn’t jarring or strange in the slightest, partly because A blues and C are harmonic cousins, partly because the entire performance has been full of just such superpositions.
They do this all the time
My long polytonality post focuses on Light, which is a showcase for the band’s harmonic fluidity; Trey regularly solos for minutes at a time relying primarily on non-scale tones, nutball whole-tone runs, and the like, and Page and Mike are completely free to echo him or not. (The 8/15/11 Light features one of the most dizzying games of harmonic Tag I’ve ever heard the band play; it’s a masterpiece, and it’s not even the deepest jam of that show. Go listen.)
But the same point — that the ‘blissful’ or ‘weightless’ or ‘effortless’ quality of Phish’s recent music comes, in part, from a specific quality of harmonic freedom and easy polytonality, which (if you like) can be extrapolated to a metaphysics(!!) of radical copresence — could be illustrated using examples from dozens of ‘3.0'-era jams. Split, Disease, Rock’n’Roll, and especially Carini have served as platforms for this new ‘openness,’ which differs crucially from Phish’s patient late-90s psychedelia in that it’s never mired in one harmonic state. Let’s face it: the 7/21/99 My Left Toe might be one of the great ‘bliss’ jams of the band’s history, but it’s one chord for 16 minutes…except for the bits where it’s two chords, specifically I-IV, specifically the same two chords that every improvisatory rock band falls on when one chord is going to drive the audience to suicide. I love that jam, but it’s a sonic experiment, and (except for some I-iv embroidery from Page) it’s totally static.
Forecast of the post-hiatus years. Easy to say that now, of course.
Some of this freedom comes from Page and Mike taking leadership roles in the music; some of it is a matter of Trey listening in a more egoless way than before; some of it is Fish’s still(!)-improving responsiveness. But I think the key dynamic at play is this: they started out with the explicit aim of being ‘a single chord,’ a musical unit moving fluidly through time and mutating around a basic harmonic idea (Bowie’s scale, Hood’s chords), and at some point in the last decade they achieved that goal — and in the process discovered that their deep connection as musicians allowed them to take on a level of harmonic freedom they’d never even attempted before, without violating the integrity of their evolving improvised structures by playing against the movement of the jam. That’s the difference between now and 1992, or 1994, or 1999 or 2003 or even 2009. They’re free now, but now they’re also wise. They bring each other along.
They bring us along. It’s not complicated anymore. It’s boundlessly, joyfully complex. It’s the system of a new world.
It’s as good as they’ve ever been.
