At certain, albeit fleeting, moments in one's life the meaning of music dawns upon you. I'd like to tell you about one of the biggest moments of musical understanding I was lucky enough to experience, but unfortunately I have far too little faith in the English language.

Believe me, I wish I could explain exactly what I came to understand at that particular moment, why it moved me until I was choking back tears, and the vision I had for music and mankind. But like a wily little leprechaun it was all gone in a flash.  So instead of flailing around in transcendental superlatives and wishy-washy emotional verbalization I'd like to approach my experience from the other side of my brain. Thanks to a recording I have had ample time to review it from a purely audio-factual perspective -- what exactly my ears were hearing at each moment. I learned a lot through my scrutiny, from ideas as absolute as guitar techniques to concepts as heady as what really constitutes dynamic intensity in improvisation. I'd even call it an intellectual and spiritual journey, from my understanding the exact moment it was over until right now as I'm writing this. I'd like to take you on a highly abridged version of this journey. For lack of a less cumbersome moniker I'll call it the "Voyage of the Last Ten Minutes of Hampton '97 Halley's Comet".

If you get a free moment with a piano, try doing this. Play a bunch of C's while holding down the sustain pedal so you get a big wash of the pitch. Then, somewhere high up, tap just one F#. If it sounds wrong or unsettling then you're hearing it like a true westerner should. For centuries western tonality regarded that interval as the most dissonant, the tritone. Monks were banished for even thinking of composing with it, classical composers claimed it demanded resolution and set it up as the antithesis to the goal of the I chord. Fortunately our modern ears are capable of hearing it in a number of other contexts. One of the most beautiful is in the shape of lydian modality. While the term sounds brainy to the layman, the Lydian mode couldn't be simpler. Just take a C major scale and replace F with F#, raising the fourth step of the scale a half-step. This is the fourth mode of the major scale, and when you sit on it most people describe it as sounding "dream-like". The most dissonant, or "dreamy", of the notes is clearly the F#, and for some the sound of it really takes some getting used to. Yet when your ears start to feel comfortable with the Lydian mode you can kind of just float along with it, aimlessly, without any desire for movement. I even go so far as to say it sounds heavenly or unearthly, as if it were the mode most closely related to God.

At 16:18 Mike decides it's time to take us there. Up to that point the band had been engaging in some ruthlessly dark funk for about 9 minutes. Trey and Page had engaged in lots of interplay, phrase trading and the like. The groove had been very constant, Fish hadn't moved from the same ride/bass/snare pulses at all and his fills were minimal. As with much of Phish's minor funk improvisation the jam to this point explored the dorian mode, in this case G dorian. The notable difference between a jam in a dorian mode as opposed to regular minor is the raised sixth step of the scale. The difference  present in dorian gives the jam a little naughtier flavor and is quite typical, even taken for granted. Yet at 16:18 when Mike is inspired to change the root of the jam form G to Bb, it has profound consequences.

Suddenly the jam has a new tonal home base, Bb. This note gets juxtaposed against G dorian, that is Page and Trey continue to play all the agreed upon notes from the first nine minutes but they are now heard in the context of Mike's new tonal center. Within seconds, whether they know it or not, everyone not unconscious in the Hampton Coliseum is hearing Bb Lydian loud and clear. Page and Trey take heed and it breathes new life into the jam.

For about a minute previous to Mike's transposition Trey had been opening his wah the farthest on the fourth beat of every second measure. This provided the rhythmic motif that Mike decides to use for his Bb - a stark, single Bb on the fourth beat of every second measure. Soon Trey and Fish follow suit. At 16:30 Trey is hammering big wahed-out Bb's on that beat. Fish has abandoned the kick and snare and resigned himself to cymbal crashes on the accented beat with eight notes on the ride to keep the pulse.  By 17:00, with one single note less than a minute earlier, Mike has changed the tonality of the jam from mean funk to light serenity, as well as changed the pulse from steadily driving funk to timed bursts of sound. This general idea continues as the band gets progressively softer with each accented hit, and all the while Page's clavi chords texturize Bb Lydian. By 18:00 the band has gotten really quiet, and Trey has looped his Bb feedback for a quiet drone. The band is a good three or four dynamic markings quieter than they were a minute ago. Just as the music reaches a virtual whisper the crowd goes bonkers. Yet that's just where the clinic begins.

All the material from the last two minutes of the jam, the Bb Lydian tonality, the accent on the eighth beat, the Bb drone, can be viewed as a foreword to the jam's final statement, which I consider to last from about the twenty minute mark forward. It becomes one of the most cohesive climaxes to a jam I've ever heard, and how they go about doing it is where most of the beauty and knowledge of our journey can be found. I constantly hear fans of improvisational bands talk about a jam's "peak"; oftentimes the dynamic summit is the most noticed and easily discernable facet of an improvisation. Certainly critical listeners and performers alike have more developed notions of what constitutes a "peak" than mere volume. In fact a more applicable definition of a "peak" is really the accomplishment of a musical goal, where the musician sets out to morph a facet of his playing towards a polar opposite. This can be as simple as increasing a guitar volume from clean picking to searing distortion, to as developed as working a melody around a harmonic cycle towards a desired key. At  20:00 each member of the band picks a desired transformation of their playing and gradually carries it out, simultaneously, until 22:50, at which point the band reaches a peak. I'd like to spell out each players transformation so you can see the unique facet that they use to peak and why it's so effective, innovative and inspirational.

Trey's transformation is found within the rapidity and phrasing of his soloing. He is constantly soloing within Bb Lydian, playing melodic, non-repetitive phrases to ornament the section. At 20:00 he starts his soloing with sparse phrases that begin and end about once every eight beats. At this point the phrases also follow the pulse precisely, making sure each note falls of an exact beat. His solo phrases get longer and longer and gradually stray from the pulse. At 20:41 he plays a line that soars beyond the beat, seemingly floating on an arbitrary tempo unrelated to the jam. By 22:10 he is absolutely shredding; his alternate-picked lines are a constant stream of notes that carry on for more than four measures at a time. By 22:50 (the peak) Trey is doing his Joe Satriani impersonation, playing huge wah covered lydian runs as fast as his fingers can handle.

      The motivic transformation found in Page's playing is more easily heard. He uses his Moog to create big sweeping glissandos (pitch bends) that start in the lower register at 19:50 and work their way up to a screaming height at 22:50. At each moment he is bending one to three pitches, and they move in various directions to various intervals. At 22:21 this independence of each pitch bend is heard, as four pitches unfold to form an Am7 chord. Within the three minute climb towards the peak these pitches climb across four octaves. At the peak Page is bending up to the same pitch summit over and over again, seemingly reinforcing the arrival at the finish line.

     The rhythm section peaks in two opposite directions. Just before 19:00 Fish introduces a new groove, a half-time take on the previous beat. At the onset he is merely providing a simple pulse, his motivic transition soon comes in his filling. At 19:45 the first tom-tom fills begin on the second half of each second measure. One minute later the fills are longer and arrive more arbitrarily. At 22:50 Fish's drum set is quaking, as he bashes out a continuous crash-cymbal and bass-drum roll for about four measures. Mike does quite the opposite. His bass lines at 19:45 is lightly bouncing, accenting the #4, fifth and root. By the peak he has abandoned all ornamentation for a low Bb, his transition from melody to a drone that swells like an anchor against the rapidity of the guitar and drums.   

     And at 22:50, I guess, that's where I had my moment of understanding. Amidst Trey's ripping, Page's screaming, Fish's wall of drums, Mike's root and Hampton's ovation I was moved to that higher plane of consciousness. The peak just snuck up on me, honestly. The melodic transposition, the pulse trading, the looped drones had me hooked. By the time the peak came I hadn't realized we were headed towards it, and the surprise, compounded with the musical embodiment of seeing Halley's Comet, worked me. 

        When one micro-examines each little aspect there is tons to be learned; when one studies the big picture its even more of a workshop. This piece could be analyzed far more in depth and it would prove to be just as rich. The outro jam, from 23:05-24:30, has a great deal more of worth while stuff to look at, in particularly a fresh little drum theme. I'll let you have a listen, and see if you can carry this journey onward.