Introduction
Ernest Giuseppe Anastasio III, born September 30, 1964, is an American guitarist, composer and lead singer most noted for his work with the jam band Phish (1983 - 2004).
Both before and after the dissolution of Phish in August 2004, Anastasio has fronted and participated in a variety of ensembles. These have included the "supergroup" Oysterhead (2000-01), with Primus bassist Les Claypool and percussionist Stewart Copeland of The Police; Bad Hat (1994-96), a trio including Jazz Mandolin Project mandolinist Jamie Masefield, also of Vermont; and Surrender to the Air (1996), a one-off album project in tribute to the free jazz of Sun Ra and including several members of the late Sun Ra's Arkestra. His solo career (1998-present) started with a trio of guitar/bass/drums, but soon became a large ensemble including a horn section, backup singers, and exotic percussion, which had its genesis in an earlier group of Burlington, Vermont musicians called the Eight Foot Fluorescent Tubes (1998).
Anastasio has also nurtured a fruitful relationship with the Vermont Youth Orchestra, for whom he has written and arranged music, and with whom he has performed at Carnegie Hall in New York City. Some of the VYO musicians were featured on Trey's self-titled second album, and VYO members have also joined his band live on at least one occasion.
The most recent members of his solo band include bassist Tony Hall, keyboardist and guitarist Les Hall, drummer Skeeto Valdez, keyboardist Ray Paczkowski, and often features Jennifer Hartswick & Christina Durfee on backing vocals. Paczkowski and Hartswick were also in former incarnations of Trey's solo band. Trey's fourth studio album, Shine (produced by noted producer Brendan O'Brien (Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Pearl Jam)), is due for release on November 1, 2005 on Columbia Records.
Life
Anastasio was born in Fort Worth, Texas, but moved with his family to New Jersey at a young age. He began playing the drums as a youth, turning to guitar while a teenager. He went to Princeton Day School for junior high, where he began to write music with classmates. Some of these tunes (e.g. "Guelah Papyrus", "Runaway Jim") would find their ways into the Phish repertoire, and many other Anastasio compositions refer to these early experiences. For high school he attended Taft Preparatory, where he founded his first two bands, Red Tide and Space Antelope, respectively.
After high school, Anastasio enrolled at the University of Vermont, attending from fall of 1983 to spring of 1986 (except for the spring of 1984). It was here that he met Jon Fishman, Mike Gordon, and Jeff Holdsworth, who founded Phish in 1983. Through UVM he also began a lifelong association with composer Ernie Stires, who taught him techniques for composition and arranging. On UVM campus he hosted an early morning radio show called Ambient Alarm Clock.
Trey was suspended from UVM for an entire semester after he broke into the science building, stole a human hand and a goat's heart, and then sent the hand and heart in a package to the science program, with a note saying, "I've got to hand it to you, you've got heart." He 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. McConnell received 50 dollars for recruiting Anastasio and 50 dollars for recruiting Fishman. While at Goddard, Anastasio wrote the song cycle The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday (Gamehendge) for his thesis. These songs would become mainstays of the Phish catalog.
Anastasio graduated from Goddard College in 1988 with a major in philosophy.
A term of endearment for Trey's dog Marley, pictured at right, was the namesake of Who Is She? Music, the company through which Anastasio and Phish have published many compositions.
Married to Susan Eliza Stateser (Sue) since August 13th, 1994, he has two daughters, Eliza Jean and Isabella. The family resides in Essex Junction, Vermont.
His mother, Dina, was an editor of Sesame Street Magazine. Trey wrote stories, songs, and albums with her as a child. His father, Ernie, was the Executive Vice President of Educational Testing Service. This company is most noted for administering the SAT and other standardized tests.
The name Trey is derived from the III in his legal name, E.G. Anastasio III. He has also been referred to with a variety of playful monikers, including 'The Good Lieutenant,' 'The Bad Lieutenant,' and 'Wilson' (after the evil archvillain of his Gamehendge saga.)
Anastasio has performed and otherwise contributed on behalf of a number of charitable causes, including Farm Aid and the Tibet House.
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, especially, the electric guitar.
He has utilized the services of his friend, luthier 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 owe something to the rare Fender Starcaster, but they 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 and distortion through a large PA system, the guitars are prone to excessive audio feedback and this requires a great deal of manual dexterity and control on the part of the guitarist in order to manage the tone. He has often used this feedback to his advantage in the creation of psychedelic, other-worldly sounds onstage and in the studio.
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 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, distortion, chorus, the wah wah pedal, phrase samplers, tremolo, delay, reverb, and pitch shifters. For descriptions of these effects processes, see this article. While most electric guitarists incorporate effects, a tradition pioneered by Hendrix, Trey 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.
Trey currently plays acoustics 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 and pieces and in the compositional techniques he uses to do so. He has written pieces that include elements of classical music, rock and roll, straight ahead jazz, funk, country music, bluegrass, blues, latin music, trance music or techno music, heavy metal, and other various styles.
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 (ca. 1985-1990), Anastasio's compositions were more through-composed, intricate and detailed in conception and were more statically arranged than his works in later years. 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 a boyhood friend and schoolmate of Anastasio, 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. Anastasio also writes a number of his own lyrics, including all lyrics on his first release with Columbia Records, 2005's Shine. In his childhood he frequently collaborated musically and lyrically with friends and schoolmates, and a number of these songs went on to become staples of his repertoire in Phish and elsewhere.
Anastasio has also expressed interest in and has demonstrated skill at composing chamber music and music for orchestra, most notably on Seis De Mayo, on 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. Reconstructed between 1996-1998 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, Bela Fleck, John Patitucci, DJ Logic, Toots and the Maytals, Tony Levin, Umphrey's McGee, John Medeski, Jerry Douglas, and Addison Groove Project, among others.
See also
Discography
- Trampled By Lambs and Pecked By the Dove, (duet with Tom Marshall) 1997 - released in 2000
- One Man's Trash, 1998
- Trey Anastasio, 2002
- Plasma (Live Album), 2003
- Seis De Mayo, 2004
- Shine, 2005