Phish - August 2nd, 2003

Second song of the IT festival is a surprise jamming vehicle. Departs "Ya Mar" proper altogether at about 6:00 and launches into a fabulous, improvisational journey with several movements. Not quite brooding, it's no upbeat calypso party either. Great segue -> into "Runaway Jim." Only exploratory post-Hiatus version (so far).

An outstanding version for any era, the IT "Reba" towers above its peers from '03 - '04. Pulling away from typical "Reba" jamming at 8:45, the play breaks into warm-hearted major mode at 11:10 and continues for several minutes, before cleanly working its way back home to a spirited finale.

Some debate whether or not this jam goes beyond "Type I." Fishman keeps the rhythm in check throughout, but Trey explores a lot of directions in this quality jam.

Outro gets slightly removed from the norm and has a unique ending.

No sloppy playing in this solid, mostly straightforward 2.0 version. It does have a cool little settle before the final peak.

Improvisational version from the IT Festival includes a fair amount of haunting and chilling effects-laden playing from Trey and Page before -> "NICU."

While average at first, the jam eventually dissolves into 10 minutes of haunting, pulsing space that is highly improvisational. A soundscape more than music that, when combined with Kuroda's lights, must have been other worldly.

See Waves Jamming Chart.

Intense straightforward playing breaks into a punchy and 2.0-style funky jam at 10:00 that continues until a -> to "Seven Below."

For being relatively short, this one really covers a lot of ground! Not to mention, nifty segue out of "Rock and Roll" and into "Scents and Subtle Sounds."

-> in from "Seven Below." A nice straightforward version of "S&SS" is sandwiched between nice fat slices of "Seven Below." -> back to "Seven Below."

-> in from "Scents And Subtle Sounds." The intensity builds following the return to "Seven Below," then a great and lower intensity groove emerges that -> to "Spread It Round."

Crazed, energetic and noisy jam. Is it a continuation of earlier play (the -> from "Seven Below" and that song's outro)? Is it "Spread It Round"? It's only been played twice, so comp this against the 7.15. Some might argue it's tougher to listen to than write about. Not we. Calling this a "wall of sound" is lazy. It's Fest Phish from the Finest in the Nation.

Imagining the Air Traffic Control Tower at Loring Airforce Base slowly rumbling back to life in the middle of the night, Phish uses IT's "The Tower Jam" to project their pain and confusion during the 2.0 era onto a dying relic of a past age in conjunction to the new century we found ourselves in. From 9min of sonic madness, static electricity, and Tortoise-esque musical space, the band coalesces around a sultry and seedy riff that builds into the swampy blues of Summer 2003. Around 15:20 Page enters with a haunting and menacing synth, leading Trey to develop a riff that sounds akin to the music you'd hear as a solar system collapses in on itself. A battle emerges between the synth approach from Page and the shoegaze approach from Trey, as the band leans into the horror and conflict producing the kind of music Kubrick would've killed to use in a battlefield tracking shot. Through it all - the heavy distortion and off-kilter rhythms, the strutting ideas abandoned in favor of more chaos - there is always Page's regal Baby Grand. An instrument that rooted so many 2.0 jams in an organic space, it serves here to remind the listener of the modern/classical ghoulish battle at play during the era. Even when the band refuses to come up for air, the baroque melodies offered by Page give the slightest hint of important music being composed in real time that you must follow the thread of. The last ten min are spent exploring potential routes towards a peak as effervescence builds before the band pulls itself back into space, and the tower shuts off for the foreseeable future.