Amsterdam 1997, Cambridge 2015.
(Not quite a review of Phish’s Amsterdam 97 box set.)
Published in
6 min readJul 19, 2015
- I listened obsessively to the second set of 7/2 when I first got the tape in summer 1997. I’d already heard the February show, but just five months later they had hit another level entirely — near as I could tell, they’d never played in that style, or (crucially) with such patience. I remember ‘patience’ being a watchword on rec.music.phish in those days. It was exciting to be part of the community then, as the band seemed to be undergoing a qualitative shift in some ways. Of course, back then it was impossible to see how far they’d travel from 1996–2000, so mostly we just kept saying: go, go, go see a show. If you’re within a day’s drive of a show on this tour, you’ve got to hear this…
- Two parallel evolutionary streams: funk as style (i.e. funk as such), and funk as ordering principle. Understood as minimalist improvisatory framework that you happen to be able to dance to, funk neatly solves Phish’s 1995–96 maximalism problem — and because the style was primarily means to an end, it doesn’t matter that they weren’t the best funk band in America (a step down from being the best something-or-other band in America, which they unquestionably had been for a couple of years). The memorable thing about the Denver show in November is that those long Set One jams were credible qua funk, but the interesting thing about it is the interesting thing about the whole rest of the year: the discovery (prompted by the Remain in Light experiment) that deep groove was the ideal basis for a new improvisatory architecture in which Trey could fully realize his democratic ambitions and fade into the ensemble, making room for new expressive contours. The climax of the Denver Ghost that begins in its eleventh minute is no longer funk, nor even ‘cow funk,’ but it’s built on several minutes of patient exercise, sonic and rhythmic.
- Now back to the Amsterdam Ghost, and the first ‘back of the worm’ outburst of the Amsterdam stand — which breaks open the pornofunk of Ghost itself and kicks off 13 minutes of something else entirely, subtly kinetic, sparse in texture. What genre does that Ghost jam belong to? What style?
- Jams like this Ya Mar sound a little like 1996 Phish with an infinitely tighter, more relaxed rhythm section. They’re the reason I prefer 1997 Phish to 99–00, and even to 1998: while much had already been gained in the transition to groove-first improvisation by 1997, nothing had yet been lost. (And however much you might like the sedimentary sonics of late-99 Phish, you have to admit that much was sacrificed in order to make it possible.)
- Listening, then, to the 1/3/15 Light. (As ever, take a minute to appreciate the consistent excellence of Light jams since 2009.) Not funk, not at all — but at heart this is that transformed rhythmic configuration of premillennium Phish, with a much narrower sonic range from Fish’s stripped-down kit but a vastly longer reach for both Page and Mike. Trey can still step back into the ensemble at will without sacrificing momentum; the major difference is that Page and Mike are both ready, indeed eager, to lead the band for a moment when he does. And vice versa. Their 2014–15 playing continues the tentative steps toward (let’s say it, see how it sounds) an African-derived rhythmic democracy which first appeared at the Omni in October 96 but sped up all throughout 97 — steps which, lemme remind you, followed naturally from Trey’s/Phish’s 1995–96 experiments in ceding control and letting the momentum of the music carry the jam, and which are in line with Trey’s longstanding egoless ideals. What was uniquely powerful about Phish’s premillennium improvisatory experiments is only more deeply present in their music now, though the style of the music is now quite different.
- Point being, the same principles that generated ‘cow funk’ also order the unusual hybrid music that they make now. You can hear that continuity in the way leadership in the jam passes around, more quickly than in the dreamy late-90s days, but much more smoothly than in pre-funk Phish, and more efficaciously than in ‘2.0’ times: i.e. when Mike steps up it’s not because Trey’s dropped the ball or sputtered out or stepped away to snort something, and moments of Page leadership don’t make breaks in the texture of the jam; they’re not events. The current form simply assumes fluidity of leadership, of tonal center, of rhythmic pulse…there are more axes of freedom in 2015 Phish than in any music they’ve ever made, even their occasional forays into identifiably Free playing. (Compare to the 1998 Ambient Jam, which drifts quickly into protean but conventionally Phishy order, complete with brief spacey-bluesy funk passage led by Trey…)
- Style as such. In terms of Phish’s jamming, not terribly interesting to me anymore: as I’ve been writing for a couple of years now, the band’s improvisatory focus is obviously on free fluid movement and the possibilities of each moment, rather than on a specific sonic/rhythmic/structural outcome, so it makes sense for us to be listening that way too — for smooth transitions between keys, say, or back and forth between meters; or in terms of whose voice is momentarily ‘out front,’ how he gets there, how the other players coalesce around him. As (especially) Page and Mike exert more and more gravitational force in jams, the nature of the band’s improvisation keeps shifting, displaying in its overall character more of Mike’s natty perversity, Page’s subtle colour shifts. The same characteristics are visible whether they’re digging into the UHF-band gonzo horror of Saw It Again or floating atop the Lydian sunsets of the Reba jam. Listening to the Amsterdam shows, the immediate takeaway is that there’s way more funk and a fair amount of thoughtful electronoise — style — and an argument in favour of post-2009 Phish compared to the Years of Ascent could plausibly start with the band’s seeming abandonment of style as a primary concern. Considering the way they built their name as improvisers in the mid-90s, through aggressive genre and style antagonism and surrealist juxtaposition of often mathematical precision and genial cruelty, that’s a huge change.
- You might say they’ve gradually moved from general interest in exploring style(s) to reverse-engineering a method from a specific style (the procedural galactominimalism of ‘cow funk’), and finally distilled the method out entirely, freeing themselves to apply it to the at times previously inaccessible raw material of pure song. Then you could hear various phases of ‘Phish 3.0’ — the ‘storage’ jamming of 2011, the polymorphous episodes of 2012, 2013's melody-first spontaneous compositions, last year’s intuitive movements between colour-spaces — as provisional forms which that method, that energetic flow, has taken. Not for nothing does this blasted 33–1/3 book analogize Phish’s improvised forms to far-from-equilibrium self-organization (in complex systems) a couple of times.
- More succinctly: Like the Dead, Phish have moved over the last 30+ years toward an ideal of genrelessness, of pure voice unconstrained by style, which is (I think) the natural order of things. Listening to the Amsterdam box, I’m excited by the deep ego-dissolving exploratory music, of course, and (of course) by the embrace of physical pleasure as a guiding improvisatory principle (Phish’s first sustained encounter with what we could maybe call the erotics of improvisation), but also by the thought that the band was slowly realizing that they’d hit on a logic without limits, a method that could carry them through the rest of their musical lives together. The music from those Amsterdam shows is exhilarating partly because it’s irresolute. It’s only just begun to settle into a self that isn’t anymore an idea, to be enough on its own. The music they’re making right now is soul-restoring partly because it’s peacefully itself.
