Reba 5/16/95

Phans who post to Phish message boards often discuss which of the band's performances are "the best" within a given category (best year? best tour? best second set? best jam? best fall 1998 Melt?), though participants often acknowledge that Phish has performed many "bests" during their long career, and that one's personal top picks are unavoidably subjective, based on which shows one might have been to (in my case, I love the Reba from 7/3/94 (Old Orchard Beach) in part because I was there, and although that Reba is especially musical and loose and free (imagine coarse cotton skirts twirling, a picnic field wildflower dance) and though it was probably one of the most transcendent moments shared by humans that particular night on Earth, it is not a musical standout when you consider the whole record of their music), or which recordings one might have borrowed from a friend during a flight of mania, etc. Most fans have a favorite Reba, and there seems to be about 40% consensus (the biggest wedge of the pie chart) that 5/16/95 is the best (see the comments posted to Best Reba Ever? (& they've got a great video of 10/31/94; about four minutes in, the lights get very Doctor Who-esque and video concrète) and I want to hear the best Reba). Here's a link to an mp3 in case you'd like to hear for yourself. While it might not be as grungy and intuitive as 12/7/97, as mellow and kind as 4/3/98, as swinging and rhythmically multidimensional and modernist as 10/15/98, or as psychedelic and spacey as 7/6/00, 5/16/94 might be the most awesome rock version of Reba, the most friendly, and the most magically hypnotic. There's a cool part where Trey loops a chord and it causes the music to take on a sort of spatial dimensionality (it is like an infinitely unfurling banner marking the perimeter of the space). According to the formal rules of the song, the jam ends when Fishman plays a certain long drum fill that goes down all the tom toms, placed so as to break the ecstatic trance of the music at the moment when Trey is most deeply into it, and on this night he plays the fill as patiently and deliberately as a lazy cartoon John Bonham sitting at the center of a rainbow of white pipes or hollow tubes

Carini 6/14/00

The only time I went to the circus (I was 10) there was this spherical metal cage into which one, two, then three performers drove their motorcycles, dirtbikes with deafening small motors and black exhaust, their headlights tracing a shifting object in the darkened Civic Center (if you were trying to notate this kind of coordination in cave times you might have painted the three interlocking circles of John Bonham’s rune from Led Zeppelin IV (when Fishman is playing well he seems to be at the center of a slowly rotating dome (synaesthesia is also hearing space (listen for the shape of the dome implied by Fishman's descending drum fills during the final refrain of Carini from Drum Logos

Loop jam at the end of Ya Mar 5/23/00

I was totally absorbed in this video, literally slackjawed, before I realized it was from a show I had listened to and written off as under-jammed, and that it had grown out of Ya Mar, a song I usually skip after a few notes, believing it to always be the same. This is one of the blessings of Phish: the hidden jams you find when you don’t just fast forward to songs you know are going to be jammed out. Secret gardens of music can grow anywhere. A breath can animate a gesture performed a hundred times by rote, bringing it to life in the same way the Creator might if He had something to say to you about love and freedom in the universe and wished to say it in music, not waiting until the message is correctly prepared for and framed and labeled, but trusting that its difference and general radiance and rightness and amniotic familiarity will transcend whatever immediate, contingent circumstances produce it, for this message transcends its bearer in such a radical way that the bearer's ugliness only heightens the feeling of freedom (the freedom is in being torn asunder