| Trey Anastasio | |
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Trey Anastasio at Red Rocks Amphitheater July 30, 2009 Photo: Dan Shinneman |
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Ernest Joseph Anastasio III |
| Born | September 30, 1964 Fort Worth, Texas United States |
| Genres | Alternative rock, jam, rock, jazz fusion, progressive rock, classical |
| Instruments | Vocals, Guitar, drums, piano, electronic keyboard, percussion, fiddle |
| Years active | 1982–present |
| Labels | Elektra, Sony, Rubber Jungle, Sony BMG, JEMP |
| Associated acts | Phish, Trey Anastasio Band, Oysterhead, Dave Matthews and Friends, Phil Lesh and Friends, Surrender to the Air, Eight Foot Fluorescent Tubes, Space Antelope, SerialPod, Bivouac Jaun, Bad Hat, New York Philharmonic, Orchestra Nashville, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. |
| Website | www.trey.com |
| Notable instruments | |
| Languedoc Guitars | |
Trey Anastasio (born Ernest Joseph Anastasio III [1] on September 30, 1964[2]) is an American guitarist, composer, and vocalist most noted for his work with the rock band Phish. He is credited by name as composer of 152 Phish original songs, 140 of them as a solo credit, in addition to 41 credits attributed to the band as a whole.[3]
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Anastasio was born in Fort Worth, Texas and moved to Princeton, New Jersey when he was three. His father, Ernest Anastasio Jr., was an executive vice president at the Educational Testing Service. His mother Dina (née Brown) was a children's book author and editor of Sesame Street Magazine. He grew up with his sister Kristy.[4]
Anastasio attended Princeton public schools through the fourth grade, then transferred to Princeton Day School. He graduated from The Taft School along with The Dude of Life, who helped pen such Phish compositions as "Suzy Greenberg", "Run Like An Antelope", "Slave to the Traffic Light", "Dinner and a Movie", and "Jennifer Dances". At Taft, he created his first two bands, Red Tide and Space Antelope. In 1978, he saw concerts by Pat Metheny and King Crimson and refers to this period as the "one year that changed me."[5]
After high school, Anastasio enrolled in the University of Vermont as a philosophy major. At UVM he met original Phish bandmates Jon Fishman, Mike Gordon, and Jeff Holdsworth. In December 1983 the group played their first gig, an ROTC dance. The setlist consisted of cover songs, including "Long Cool Woman" and "Proud Mary" which was performed twice. The band was very primitive at this time and used hockey sticks as mic stands. After performing one set, Michael Jackson's Thriller album was put on by a partygoer to drown out the band. The band wouldn't return to play but were still paid for the performance. At the University of Vermont, he hosted an early morning radio program, Ambient Alarm Clock.
While living at home for a semester, Anastasio attended classes at Mercer County Community College, and met up with childhood friend Tom Marshall, his future writing partner. Also attending Mercer was Marc Daubert who would officially join Phish as percussionist from September 1984 to February 1985. After seeing a Phish show, pianist Page McConnell joined Phish in the autumn of 1985. Anastasio, along with Jon Fishman, transferred to Goddard College.[6]
During this time he began a musical association and close friendship with composer Ernie Stires, who taught him composition, theory, and arranging.[7] While at Goddard, he composed the song cycle The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday as his senior project. These songs would become mainstays of the Phish catalog. He graduated from Goddard in 1988.
On August 13, 1994 Anastasio married Susan Eliza Statesir. They have two daughters, Eliza and Isabella.
After the break-up of Phish in 2004, he continued to tour with his own band.
On September 14, 2004, he performed with the Vermont Youth Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. [8]
In 2006, he collaborated with Phish bassist Mike Gordon and the New York City jazz and post-rock group, the Benevento/Russo Duo.
At 3:30 am on December 15, 2006, he was stopped by a Whitehall, NY patrolman for failure to keep right.[9] He was arrested for possession of drugs and spent fourteen months participating in daily meetings, drug testing, and performing community service in the Washington County, New York drug court program. On June 2008, after completing all phases of the New York State drug court, he graduated in good standing. His conviction was reduced to a misdemeanor. He has publicly thanked the officer who arrested him for turning his life around. Following this experience, he became an active participant in the National Association of Drug Court Professionals (NADCP), sharing his story on Capital Hill, and working to help raise awareness, and money, for a National Drug Court.[10]
On July 24, 2007, he released another instrumental album, The Horseshoe Curve, via his own Rubber Jungle Records. On August 14, he made a surprise guest appearance in Saratoga Springs, New York during Dave Matthews Band's performance at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. He sat in and jammed with the band during "Lie in Our Graves".
On October 20, 2007, he appeared with Phil Lesh & Friends at the Glens Falls Civic Center in Glens Falls, New York. he performed the entire show, which included Grateful Dead staples such as "Bertha", "Dark Star", "Viola Lee Blues" and "Franklin's Tower", as well as performances of Anastasio songs "Shine" and "Plasma".
On May 7, 2008, Trey and the rest of Phish accepted a ‘Lifetime Achievement prize’ at the 2008 Jammy Awards.[11]
On June 5, 2008, Trey guested on the Robert Randolph Band's set, who opened for an Eric Clapton concert.
On July 6, 2008 he performed a solo acoustic set at the Rothbury Music Festival in Michigan. The encore included an impromptu pairing with Phish bassist Mike Gordon debuting two future Phish songs: "Backwards Down the Number Line" (a song inspired by a letter written to Anastasio by long time Phish lyricist and childhood friend, Tom Marshall) and "Alaska".
On August 7, 2008, he played his first post-rehab electric show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, NY debuting: "Alaska"(electric version; the song was debuted acoustic at Rothbury), "Peggy", "Gone", "Backwards Down the Number Line" (electric version; the song was debuted acoustic at Rothbury), "Valentine", "Greyhound Rising", and "Light". Four of these seven songs have found their way into the Phish live repertoire and on official studio releases.
On August 10, 2008, Trey Anastasio and Classic TAB played a set at the All Points West Music & Arts Festival at Liberty State Park in New Jersey. They opened with "Sand" and played a few Phish classics including "Gotta Jibboo" and "Heavy Things".[12]
On September 27, 2008 Anastasio debuted Time Turns Elastic, an orchestral epic co-created with composer Don Hart, at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville Tennessee.
On March 6–8th, 2009 Trey played a reunion concert run with Phish at the Hampton Coliseum.
The east coast premier of "Time Turns Elastic" was performed on May 21, 2009 with conductor Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore, Maryland. The performance also included the debut of the orchestral version of Anastasio's "First Tube".
On May 31, 2009 Trey played with Phish at Fenway Park in Boston, the start of their reunion tour. On June 12 & 14, 2009 Phish co-headlined the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester, Tennessee. On the final night, Bruce Springsteen joined Phish for "Mustang Sally", "Bobby Jean" and "Glory Days".
Trey continued to tour with Phish throughout the summer of 2009, and Phish announced their first ever 3 day festival, and their first festival to not be held on the east coast. "Festival 8" was held over the three day weekend over Halloween in 2009, in Indio, California.
On September 12, 2009 Trey performed "An Evening with Trey Anastasio and the New York Philharmonic" at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan with the New York Philharmonic, playing various compositions including "Divided Sky","You Enjoy Myself", and "Time Turns Elastic". This concert was a benefit for the Kristy Anastasio Manning (his sister) Memorial Fund and the New York Philharmonic.[13]
On March 15, 2010, Trey inducted one of his favorite bands, Genesis, into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and claimed "It's impossible to overstate what impact this band and musical philosophy had on me as a young musician. I'm forever in their debt."[14] In addition to Anastasio's speech, Phish appeared and performed two Genesis songs, "Watcher of the Skies" and "No Reply At All". Genesis did not perform.
On June 7, 2010, Trey appeared as a surprise musical guest on Conan O'Brien's "The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour" stop at the Tower Theater (Upper Darby, Pennsylvania). He performed "Alaska."
Both before and after the dissolution of Phish in August 2004, Anastasio has fronted and participated in a variety of different ensembles.
Anastasio played drums in early youth, but in the middle of his teenage years developed a facility for the acoustic guitar and, more notably, the electric guitar.
Some of his earliest influences include the works of Russell Jacobsen, and Schro-Baby.
He has employed the services of his friend and audio technician Paul Languedoc (Phish's soundman from 1986–2004) throughout his career. The highly resonant hollow-body electric guitars built by Languedoc for Anastasio, his Ibanez Tube Screamers, and Ross Compressors are key to his signature tone. Trey has several custom Languedoc hollowbody electric guitars:
"…He [Paul Languedoc] told me about nine months ago, that he had put aside this magic piece of wood to build one last, really special guitar. And he gave it to me about a week ago, and this is it – [presenting guitar to the crowd.] And I’ve just got to say that I’ve just been freaking out all night about how good this guitar is – it’s the magic guitar…"
The headstock features an ocelot instead of his late dog Marley, and has a koa body with wood binding and unique fretboard inlays. Fans have since dubbed Trey's latest guitar the "Ocedoc."
The designs of Anastasio's Languedoc guitars, inspired in part by the Fender Starcaster, are uniquely conceived and handcrafted instruments that make use of set maple necks with 24-fret ebony fret boards, dual Seymour Duncan SH-1 '59 humbuckers. The Languedoc also has a coil drop switch and a pickup switch between parallel or series. The first two Languedocs also featured a single coil pickup in the middle (each was removed when it became the backup guitar). Because they are true hollow-bodies (as opposed to semi-hollow body construction), and because Anastasio typically plays with two Ibanez Tube Screamer overdrives, the guitars are prone to excessive feedback, requiring a great deal of manual dexterity and control on the guitarist's part in order to manage the signal. 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 ("The Squirming Coil", "The Divided Sky", and "You Enjoy Myself", to name a few, use this unique feedback in portions of the song).
Anastasio's electric guitar technique is largely conventional; he does not typically make use of tapping techniques and does not usually play slide guitar (an example of when he does is in the Oysterhead section of Les Claypool's 5 Gallons of Diesel). He normally uses a 2.0mm Adamas graphite guitar pick, but does not always do so. Melodically, he often incorporates modes, notably the dorian, mixolydian, and locrian, as well as pentatonic scales. In addition to scales, Anastasio makes abundant use of arpeggios while improvising as well as in his compositional material. He often uses pre bends in order to end a jam. He also typically has a slight chorus effect on his guitar, although that is not always the case. He is known for his skill in improvisation. In the tradition of bebop players, he often quotes, or "teases" his own music or the music of others in his solos, sometimes subtly and other times directly.
Anastasio uses barre chords extensively, including open voicings of minor seventh, minor ninth, and minor thirteenth chords in addition to the sharp ninth chords associated with blues-based guitarists such as Jimi Hendrix. He incorporates exotic chord progressions and voicings, chord substitutions, ghost notes, and rhythmic scratching.
While he has concentrated more on funk, jazz, and rock music styles in his electric guitar technique (especially since Phish's Remain in Light cover on Halloween 1996), Anastasio is also well-versed 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 two Ibanez TS-9 Tube Screamers (with Analogman's Silver Mod) in sequence, chorus and the famous Univibe clone the Black Cat Vibe, a Ross compressor (he switched eventually to Analogman's Bicompressor, then dropped the compressor from his rig) , a wah wah pedal (usually a Real McCoy Custom 3 by Geoffrey Teese), a Boomerang phrase sampler, tremolo, delay, reverb, and pitch shifters, as well as a Leslie rotating speaker horn. He controls these devices singularly or in batch with a Custom Audio footpedal bank. His use of delay loops is a signature.
In the early 1990s, Anastasio employed a custom 2X12 cab powered by either a 100w Mesa/Boogie Mark III head or, later, a Custom Audio Electronics 3-channel preamp and Groove Tubes power amp. In mid-1997, he switched to a pair of modified 1965 Fender Deluxe Reverb amps, one serving as a backup. He stopped using the compressor in his rig in 2002 after he lost it. However, some fans noticed a change in his sound and devised a plan to purchase and send Trey a new compressor.[18] He was excited and happy that people actually noticed the missing Ross and returned it to his rig.[19][20]
Anastasio currently plays an acoustic by Martin. In 2005, Martin released a Trey Anastasio signature model acoustic guitar. Trey's signature model is a Dreadnought body with a curved Venetian cutaway. The guitar also has an Italian alpine spruce top, mahogany sides and a three-piece back with "wings" of mahogany and a center wedge of flame-figured Hawaiian koa (similar to a D-35). The neck width is 1 11/16" at the nut. The guitar is finished with a flamed koa headplate and snowflake fingerboard inlays. Martin built only 141 of these guitars, which quickly sold out. Further description from Martin is as follows:
“Martin’s mortise and tenon construction and 5/16” “Hybrid” scalloped bracing give the DC Trey Anastasio Signature Edition solid feel and tone. Fine herringbone encircles the top, an understated complement to the Style 45 rosette with its center ring of colorful paua shell. Multicolored Style 45 mosaic back strips add to the drama of the back tonewoods, while the grained ivoroid binding, end piece and heel cap are accented with black/white line inlays.
Both the headstock and the fingerboard are similarly bound in grained ivoroid and accented with back/white inlays. The koa headplate provides the backdrop for a unique Style 45 C.F. Martin block letter inlay in black micarta. The black ebony fingerboard features the distinctive diamonds and squares abalone pearl inlay first seen on a 1922 00–42 Martin made for the Wurlitzer Company: a Maltese cross at the 3rd fret, two diamonds at the 5th fret, a square at the 7th fret, two diamonds at the 9th fret, a square with cat’s eyes at the 12th fret and a cat’s eye at the 15th fret. Trey Anastasio’s signature is inlaid in mother of pearl between the 18th and 20th frets. The belly bridge is also crafted from black ebony, as are the buttons on the Schaller gold mini tuners.”
In his acoustic playing, Anastasio makes use of nontraditional tunings to create ethereal ambiance or to recreate folk styles, as did Jimmy Page and Nick Drake.
In college, Anastasio studied composition under composer and arranger Ernie Stires. "Guelah Papyrus", featured on Phish's major label debut A Picture of Nectar, features a Stires-influenced fugue instrumental section called "The Asse Festival" as a bridge between verses. In the early years of Phish, many of Anastasio's compositions were through-composed, intricate and detailed in conception (for example, "The Divided Sky", "You Enjoy Myself", "The Asse Festival", "Reba", "Fluff's Travels"). Particularly in the music he has written for his touring and recording projects apart from Phish, Anastasio has used improvisation as the driving force behind simplified songwriting.
Tom Marshall, a New Jersey computer systems professional and friend of Anastasio since his Princeton childhood, has been his primary songwriting collaborator, acting as lyricist. Anastasio 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 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 1998 album The Story of the Ghost. Anastasio also writes a number of his own lyrics, including all of the lyrics on his first release with Columbia Records, 2005's Shine.
One of Anastasio’s signature compositional techniques is the use of episodic (or organic) form. “Fluff’s Travels” and “You Enjoy Myself” are good examples of through-composed pieces which evolve from one musical idea to the other, never returning to a previous musical statement. This technique had been used in a rock music setting by relatively few before Phish (Frank Zappa and the Grateful Dead are two such examples).
Anastasio employs modal improvisation, first made popular by Miles Davis in the late 50’s/early 60’s.
Anastasio has also demonstrated skill at composing chamber music and music for orchestra, most notably on Seis De Mayo, his second solo album, and in his collaborations with the Vermont Youth Orchestra.
On September 27, 2008, Anastasio and Orchestra Nashville premiered a new work titled Time Turns Elastic, an original long-form piece that was orchestrated by composer and arranger Don Hart, and featured Anastasio on lead guitar and vocals. Anastasio previously collaborated with Hart and Orchestra Nashville in his orchestral performance of "Guyute" at Bonnaroo 2004. He performed the same composition at Carnegie Hall with the Vermont Youth Orchestra on September 14, 2004 and with the New York Philharmonic on September 12, 2009.
The Barn AKA The Farmhouse is the name given to Anastasio's rehearsal and recording facility in the countryside near Burlington, Vermont. It was reconstructed between 1996 and 1998 from an existing structure, the Alan Irish Barn. The Barn has been used by Phish and most of Anastasio's projects since 1999. The cover of Farmhouse is from the outhouse located right next to The Barn.
Other artists who have recorded or performed at The Barn include Gordon Stone Band, Herbie Hancock, Béla Fleck, John Patitucci, DJ Logic, Toots & the Maytals, Tony Levin, The Slip, RAQ, John Medeski, Jerry Douglas, Nicholas Cassarino, and Addison Groove Project, among others.
Beginning in 2006, The Barn was transformed from a commercial recording facility into a studio environment providing accommodations and work space for artists participating in the Seven Below residency program.
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