"Art loves chance; chance loves art." - Aristotle.

I just finished reading an excellent biography of Rembrandt called Rembrandt's Eyes, by Simon Schama, which includes a shorter bio of Rubens and a lot of interesting detail about Northern Europe in the 17th century thrown in for a good measure. Great book -- fun to read and full of full color reproductions. Highly recommended if you're in to that sort of thing.

As a result, I've come to see an analogy between Rembrandt's paintings and Phish's music. There are, of course, other painters (e.g. Van Gogh) and musicians (e.g. the Dead, Miles Davis) who I could be comparing here instead, but I was reading a book about Rembrandt and, well, the guys in Phish are still actively painting their sonic landscapes, so Rembrandt and Phish it is.

Roughly speaking, the fashion in Northern Europe towards the end of Rembrandt's lifetime (c. 1660) was to paint slickly and with great detail. Artists seeking lucrative commissions aimed to combine rigorous traditions about the role of art, the relative social ranks of the people depicted in a painting, the iconographic details, and so on, into the most "realistic" image possible. In other words, the fashion was, more or less, to spell out everything in the painting explicitly: this is the boss, this is why he's important, these are his friends, these are the symbols of his success, and so on. These paintings leave little to the imagination beyond the game of figuring out who's who and what's what in a fairly superficial way and, perhaps, admiring the technique behind being able to paint "realistically".

This kind of painting reminds me of the majority of today's mainstream, Top 40, popular music. The images or songs are easy to get, easy to digest, may make a person feel good in a superficial way and that's all. The artists who painted these works are, I'm proposing, analogous to today's session musicians: the best of both types have great chops and versatility, possibly a deep knowledge of the artistic context they inhabit, but they're delivering according to someone else's preferences and standards.

"Realistic" is analogous to "over produced". There's no noise, little warmth, no character. It may not be clear whether or not the painting is a copy or reproduction, and it may not be clear whether or not there's a real drummer or a drum machine. And, to most consumers of this kind of art, it doesn't matter.

Rembrandt refused to follow this 17th century artistic trend, and paid for it by losing commissions and going bankrupt. Phish refuses to follow this analogous 20th century popular music trend, and gets virtually no radio play or mainstream recognition.

Rembrandt ventured in an entirely novel direction for the time: he used color, broad and rough strokes, darkness and light (chiaroscuro), purposeful blurring, intentional ambiguity, and big gobs of paint (impasto) to suggest the image, or parts of the image. If you go right up close to one of these paintings, you may not even be able to tell what the image is of -- it'll look like a bumpy, haphazard color field. It might even look amateurish. But if you back off a distance, these gobs, colors, rough strokes, etc., will resolve into a powerful image conveying subtleties, nuances, and depth that a fully realistic image is less likely to have.

However, even in paintings in which Rembrandt makes the most significant use of these techniques of suggesting the emotional, the physical, the philosophical point of the work, there are still passages in the painting that use fine, carefully rendered detail.

I'm imaging an analogy between Rembrandt's art, for example th e Night Watch, and Phish's more complex compositions like, say, You Enjoy Myself. In each case, there are passages that are carefully composed and carefully executed -- the fine details that prove the technical and compositional skills of the artists.

But in both cases there are also long passages where the "strokes" are broader, seemingly haphazard, or missing altogether. There are passages where a figure is barely sketched yet still gives the painting a kind of momentum, or where the music seems to suggest a feeling - treading around a variety of emotional states - rather than making one emotion explicit.

As in the best of Rembrandt's masterpieces, the best of Phish's jams can stand repeated revisiting. Unlike the easily digestible and "popular" forms of painting or music, closer examination reveals depths and nuances that are not obvious at first glance or first listen. The difference between the best work of Phish and Rembrandt compared to the slick and easy-to-swallow mainstream stuff is the difference between a masterpiece and merely a work of art. It's the difference between genius and merely good technique.

If we broaden our perspective so that we consider not just a particular painting or performance but rather an entire era of work, we see that there are themes and phrases that appear again and again. These are the details that make paying attention to a career worthwhile.

The kind of jams that Phish has been doing since '97 - there are, of course, plenty of earlier examples - are like masterpieces, full of subtlety and worthy of careful attention. I think this is much less true of Phish when they are playing in their more straightforward tension and release mode, or when Trey is demonstrating his guitar virtuosity by playing fast and rocking hard.

Popular mainstream works of art - paintings, music, movies, literature - are easier to digest, aspire to a lower common denominator, and usually age fast, because, ultimately, there's just not much to them. Great works of art seem to have a timelessness to them and they can stand being revisited again and again. Great art has the ability to continue being fresh and to keep offering up surprises and new possibilities for interpretation.

Which leads us to Trey's effects pedals.

Some folks don't like what they take to be Trey's dependence on his array of effects pedals. I hear that, especially when he's dancing around on his pedals and seemingly not paying much attention to playing his guitar. But consider this: he's exploiting tools and techniques that haven't even existed for very long; he's experimenting with the state of the art to create sounds and soundscapes that have never existed before. These pedals are like adding new colors to his palette and new techniques to applying the paint.