The Trey Anastasio Trio at SummerStage Central Park at Rumsey Playfield

Trey Anastasio

Ernest Anastasio III, known professionally as Trey Anastasio, was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and moved at age three to Princeton, New Jersey, where he learned to play drums. In his mid-to-late teens, he attended a prep school in Watertown, Connecticut, where he joined an 11-piece classic rock band called Red Tide as vocalist. In his junior year, seven of the musicians had graduated; Red Tide reformed as Space Antelope and Anastasio became the guitarist. Trey attended university in Burlington, Vermont, where in 1983 he started the band Phish as the lead vocalist and guitarist. He is credited by name as composer of 152 Phish original songs, 140 of them as a solo credit. In addition to his work with Phish, Anastasio has released 11 solo albums and had performed with several symphony orchestras and in countless side bands. Starting in 1998, perhaps the umbrella of these side projects is the Trey Anastasio Band (TAB) (originally known as Eight Foot Fluorescent Tubes), although there have been performances by the Trey Anastasio Trio (TAT) and similar sextets, octets and dectets. Anastasio's 11th and most recent solo album is 2015's Paper Wheels.

Tonight's concert at SummerStage Central Park at Rumsey Playfield was originally billed as the first tour of the Trey Anastasio Trio since 1999 while keyboardist Ray Paczkowski of the Trey Anastasio Band recuperated from brain tumor surgery. Paczkowski recovered faster than anticipated and joined the band to transform the concerts into theTrey Anastasio Band's 20th anniversary tour with bassist Tony Markellis and drummer Russ Lawton—the lineup often known as Classic TAB. The band performed two sets plus five songs in the encore. Many of these songs have transitioned back and forth over the years between Phish and Anastasio's side bands. Except for the three solo acoustic songs performed during the encore, the set consisted of songs where the lyric portion was dwarfed by the extended instrumental jams. In that sense, the concert was very much like a more laid-back Phish concert in a more intimate venue. Anastasio's guitar work was mesmerizing, very often played as a series of bursts that seemed like links in a chain rather than as a long continuous scales. This was not a Phish concert, but it was a pretty close copy.

Visit Trey Anastasio at www.trey.com.

Setlist

Set 1:

1. Blaze On (Phish song)
2. Cayman Review
3. Everything’s Right (Trey Anastasio Band song)
4. Heavy Things (Phish song)
5. Gotta Jibboo (Phish song)
6. Party Time (Phish song)
7. Miss You (Phish song)
8. Sand (Phish song)

Set 2:

1. No Men In No Man’s Land (Phish song)
2. Ghost (Phish song)
3. Camel Walk (Phish song)
4. Dark and Down
5. Soul Planet (Trey Anastasio Band song)
6. Steam (Phish song)
7. Undermind (Phish song)
8. Push On ‘Til the Day

Encore:

1. Waste (Phish song; Anastasio solo acoustic)
2. Strange Design (Phish song; Anastasio solo acoustic)
3. More (Phish song; Anastasio solo acoustic)
4. Alaska (Phish song)
5. First Tube (Phish song)