Trey Anastasio

Trey Anastasio performing live at Phish's IT Festival in Limestone, Maine on August 2, 2003.

Ernest Giuseppe "Trey" Anastasio III, born September 30, 1964, is an American guitarist, composer and vocalist most noted for his work with the jam band, Phish, between 1983 and 2004. Among music critics and historians, Anastasio is considered to be one of the most accomplished guitarists and composers alive today, rated as number 73 on Rolling Stone's List of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.

Life

He began playing the drums as a youth, turning to guitar while a teenager. He attended Princeton Day School for junior high school, where he began to write music with some of his classmates. Some of these songs (e.g. "Guelah Papyrus" and "Runaway Jim") would find their ways into the Phish repertoire, and many other Anastasio compositions refer to these early experiences. For senior high school, Anastasio attended Taft Preparatory, where he founded his first two bands, Red Tide and Space Antelope, respectively.

After Anastasio completed high school, he enrolled in the University of Vermont, attending from fall of 1983 to spring of 1986. It was here that he met Jon Fishman, Mike Gordon, and Jeff Holdsworth, who founded Phish in 1983 (though Jeff Holdsworth dropped out). Through the University of Vermont, Anastasio also began a lifelong association with composer Ernie Stires, who taught him techniques for composition and arranging. While at the University of Vermont, Anastasio hosted an early morning radio program, Ambient Alarm Clock.

Anastasio was eventually suspended from college for an entire semester after he broke into the science building and stole a human hand and a goat's heart. During his suspension, Anastasio traveled through Europe with friends before returning to Vermont to continue work with Phish. After meeting pianist Page McConnell, who soon joined Phish, Anastasio attended Goddard College from fall of 1986 to spring of 1988. While at Goddard, Anastasio assembled the song cycle The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday as his senior thesis. These songs would also become mainstays of the Phish catalog. Anastasio graduated from Goddard College in 1988 with a major in philosophy.

Anastasio married Susan Eliza Stateser on August 13th, 1994. He now has two daughters, Eliza Jean and Isabella. The family resides in Essex Junction, Vermont. He also had a dog, Marley, but she has since deceased.

Projects

Both before and after the dissolution of Phish in August of 2004, Anastasio has fronted and participated in a variety of different ensembles, including:

Bad Hat in 1994, which included fellow Vermonter Jamie Masefield on mandolin, played jazz for a few months. They billed themselves as "the quietest band around."
Surrender To The Air in 1995 and 1996 was also jazz-oriented, but a much more loose, "colorful exploration" of sound. The group was very experimental, including long sections of improvisation all connected by segments conducted by Anastasio. The group released a self-titled album in March of 1996. It featured several members of the late Sun Ra's big band, the Arkestra, which was (among other modes) an archetypical free jazz ensemble.
New York! in 1997 was one performance with Anastasio, Mike Gordon of Phish, James Harvey, and a local punk band. Several Phish songs were debuted by New York!, including "Dirt" and "Saw It Again".
Eight Foot Flourescent Tubes in 1998 was a local band in Vermont fronted by Anastasio on April 17 of that year. The band debuted a number of songs heard in Anastasio's live performances today, including "First Tube", "Last Tube", and "Mozambique."
The Trio in 1999 was an evolution of Eight Foot Flourescent Tubes. Anastasio's first solo tour was with The Trio, which included himself, Russ Lawton, and Tony Markellis.
Vermont Youth Orchestra was conducted by Trey on an number of occasions from the year 2000 until today. Trey's attraction to complex compositions was apparent on his 2004 release, Seis De Mayo, which included some of his work with the Vermont Youth Orchestra, as well as other, smaller ensembles.
The Sextet in 2000 was an evolution of The Trio with three horns added to the band. Some of the music originally performed by The Sextet was later seen on his 2002 release, Trey Anastasio.
Oysterhead in 2000 was a trio which included Primus bassist Les Claypool and The Police percussionist, Stewart Copeland. The "supergroup", as it was called, released an album in 2001 named The Grand Pecking Order.
The Octet in 2001 was an evolved version of The Sextet, which added keyboards, a tenor saxophone, and a flute.
The Dectet in 2002 through 2004 explored complex arrangements and changes of some songs included on Trey Anastasio, and was an evolved version of The Octet, now a ten-piece band.
70 Volt Parade is Anastasio's current project, which is more of a stereotypical-form rock band than The Trio, The Sextet, The Octet, and The Dectet. Only six members are included, two of which are backup vocalists. 70 Volt Parade was formed in early 2005, and has continued since then.

Anastasio, The Guitarist

Trey Anastasio enjoys a reputation as one of the preeminent guitarists in contemporary music. He played drums in early youth, but quickly developed a facility for the acoustic guitar and, more notably, the electric guitar.

Anastasio has utilized the services of his friend and audio technician Paul Languedoc, throughout his career. The highly resonant hollowbody electric guitars built by Languedoc for Anastasio are key to his signature tone. The designs of Trey's Languedoc guitars, inspired in part by the commercially unsuccessful Fender Starcaster, are uniquely conceived and handcrafted instruments that make use of exotic woods such as koa and custom-wired electronics. Because they are true hollowbodies (as opposed to semi-hollowbody construction), and because Trey typically plays with overdrive through a large PA System, the guitars are prone to excessive audio feedback, requiring a great deal of manual dexterity and control on the part of the guitarist in order to manage the tone. Anastasio has learned to tame this feedback and often used it to his advantage in the creation of psychedelic and other-worldly sounds onstage and in the studio.

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Anastasio playing with Oysterhead in 2001.

Anastasio's electric guitar technique is largely conventional; he does not typically make use of tapping techniques and does not play slide guitar. He normally uses a guitar pick but does not always do so. Melodically, he heavily incorporates modes and pentatonic scales, which he alters with blue notes in the blues tradition. He is known for his skill at improvisation. Although he possesses a fluent technique, he is known for the quality of the notes he plays more so than the quantity; he is not primarily a "speed player" and has quietly expressed contempt for instrumentalists who emphasize virtuosity at the expense of content. In the tradition of bebop players, he often quotes his own music or the music of others in his solos, sometimes very subtly and at other times quite directly.

Trey also utilizes barre chords extensively, including open voicings of minor seven, minor nine, and minor thirteen chords in addition to the sharp nine chords associated with blues-based guitarists such as Jimi Hendrix. Anastasio's comping is every bit as tasteful and creative as his lead playing, incorporating exotic chord progressions and voicings, chord substitution, ghost notes, and rhythmic scratching.

While he has concentrated more on funk, jazz, and rock and roll styles in his electric guitar technique, Anastasio is also fluent in country music and bluegrass modes of playing and has credited Jerry Garcia as an influence in this realm.

Effects processors play a crucial role in Anastasio's guitar technique. He uses effects such as overdrive pedals, chorus/Univibe-like effects, a compressor, a wah wah pedal, phrase samplers, tremolo, delay, reverb, and pitch shifters, as well as a Leslie rotating speaker horn. For descriptions of some of these effects processes, see this article. While most electric guitarists incorporate effects, a tradition pioneered by Hendrix, Anastasio switches between combinations of effects with a greater degree of facility and creativity than is the norm. He is aided in this by a custom audio controller that allows him to control combinations of electronics efficiently in batch with his feet. His use of delay loops is a signature, and in high gain (overdrive) stages he sometimes plays with unprecedented sustain. Also, Anastasio is known for frequent switching between combinations of guitar pickups and for continually adjusting their tone and volume levels, giving his sound an added dimension of versatility.

Anastasio currently plays an acoustic by Martin, often making use of nontraditional tunings to create ethereal ambience or to recreate folk styles, as did Jimmy Page. He has played custom acoustic models in the past. He does not pick up the acoustic guitar frequently onstage, but it is an essential component of his studio sound and he has written some unique and distinctive compositions for the acoustic guitar.

Anastasio, The Composer

Anastasio's compositional style is marked by a high degree of versatility in both the genres in which he writes songs or pieces and in the compositional techniques he uses to do so. He has written pieces that include elements of classical music, rock and roll, jazz, funk, country music, bluegrass, blues, latin music, trance music, heavy metal, and other various styles.

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Anastasio with the Vermont Youth Orchestra.

He is a skilled practitioner of the verse-chorus form songwriting prevalent throughout popular music and folk music, but also has used techniques derived from classical music. In this respect, many of his compositions, or at least portions of them, can be viewed as neoclassical in keeping with the tradition of composers such as Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky. Some of these techniques include the use of imitative counterpoint, atonality, polyrhythms, irregular meters and phrasing, and non-linear chord progressions. Many of these techniques he learned and developed under the tutelage of Vermont composer and pianist Ernie Stires.

In the early years of Phish, Anastasio's compositions were more through-composed, intricate and detailed in conception and were more statically arranged than his works in later years. Examples of this include "You Enjoy Myself" or "The Divided Sky." Particularly in the music he has written for his touring and recording projects since Phish, he has focused more on songwriting than composition, per se, using improvisation as the major driving force behind these works in live performance. Some commentators have speculated that, in this shift, he could be consciously or unconsciously creating a body of standards upon which future generations of musicians will be able to elaborate.

Tom Marshall, a biologist and friend of Anastasio since his childhood, has been his primary songwriting collaborator as lyricist. Trey has often pulled lyrics for his music from large notebooks of poems and prose kept by Marshall, and the pair have also taken working retreats or vacations during which they wrote and/or recorded demos of new material. One such demo, Trampled By Lambs and Pecked by the Dove, has been commercially released, and many of the songs included on this release were reincarnated into Phish's Farmhouse. Anastasio also writes a number of his own lyrics, including all of the lyrics on his first release with Columbia Records, 2005's Shine.

Anastasio has also expressed interest in and has demonstrated skill at composing chamber music and music for orchestra, most notably on Seis De Mayo, his eponymously titled second album, and in his collaborations with the Vermont Youth Orchestra.

The Barn

"The Barn" is the name given to Anastasio's legendary rehearsal and recording facility in the countryside near Burlington, Vermont. It was reconstructed between the years 1996 and 1998 from an existing structure, the Alan Irish Barn. The Barn has been used by Phish and all of Anastasio's projects since 1999.

Other artists who have recorded and/ or performed at The Barn include Herbie Hancock, Béla Fleck, John Patitucci, DJ Logic, Toots and the Maytals, Tony Levin, Umphrey's McGee, John Medeski, Jerry Douglas, and Addison Groove Project, among others.

Discography

External links