Edition: U.S. / Global

POP REVIEW;Communal Jams With a Legacy

Published: January 1, 1996

When the Grateful Dead disbanded in 1995, one of the band's legacies was a different kind of arena rock. It's not about brute force or exaggerated melodrama or spectacle; it's arena rock that twinkles and glides in long, open-ended jams while fans dance barefoot in the aisles.

Phish, which started a sold-out two-night stand at Madison Square Garden on Saturday night, has done well with the Dead's legacy, making intricate music that delights an ever-expanding cult following. Its roots in the Dead are unmistakable, but Phish is a next-generation jam band. Like be-boppers in the wake of Charlie Parker, Phish brings its own ideas to an idiom pioneered by others.

Phish got started in 1983, settled its current lineup in 1985 and released its first album in 1988. From its base in Burlington, Vt., it worked the college circuit until its audience grew to fill arenas. Its lyrics incorporate collegiate grievances about unfaithful girlfriends and God's indifference along with picaresque fantasies.

As the Dead used to do, Phish allows audience members to tape concerts; on Saturday night, a thicket of microphones on long poles rose from the seats behind the sound booth. And like the Dead, Phish has fans who follow the band from show to show, revel in band minutiae and trade Phish tales on the Internet.

On Saturday, Phish played for just over two and a half hours, with songs from all six of its albums and unrecorded material. The core of Phish's music has unabashed links to the Grateful Dead. Trey Anastasio, on guitar, has picked up both tone and phrasing from Jerry Garcia, though he also has a jazzier side; Page McConnell uses the barrelhouse and gospel vocabulary of the Dead's keyboardists, though he also dabbles in classical piano. With Mike Gordon on bass and Jon Fishman on drums, the rhythms lilt and gently march like Dead songs; underlying riffs hint at blues, folk and country.

The band's jams often use the Dead's communal approach, with no clear separation of solos from accompaniment. Mr. Anastasio and Mr. McConnell shadow and leapfrog each other's improvisations, surfacing from the music's momentum and then submerging in it again. They listen carefully; in one stretch, Mr. McConnell guessed where Mr. Anastasio was heading, and added a chiming piano octave where each phrase began, making the music gleam.

Phish is more streamlined than the Dead were. With one guitarist and one drummer instead of two of each, there are fewer perspectives on the rhythm. Phish is also more organized, less inclined to ramble or search audibly for its next maneuver than the Dead were. To yield something like a Dead concert without the dead spots, Phish maps the territory between fixed songs and haphazard jamming; its instrumental passages move purposefully from section to section. Though there's room for spontaneity, there are also long, satisfying crescendos and carefully plotted moves from consonance to dissonance and back.

Phish has sources outside the Grateful Dead. It's fond of progressive rock; some songs, like "Divided Sky," included zigzagging, key-changing interludes with the precision and angularity of Frank Zappa's tunes. It is also at home with reggae and with 1970's kitsch, like Eumir Deodato's disco "2001 ('Also Sprach Zarathustra')." And Phish doesn't mind playing to the crowd now and then; at one point, band members suddenly froze in place at the end of a song, standing still as a roar filled the room.

The concert had abundant variety, from a rippling, bell-toned waltz to a surging lead-guitar anthem, from nimble bluegrass to rumbling discord. Nearly all of it moved along with the breezy momentum that can only be generated by a band with superb reflexes. "You can feel good," the band members sang in "Harry Hood," and the music made sure that everybody did.

Photo: Trey Anastasio, the guitarist of Phish, at Madison Square Gardenon Saturday night. (Chang W. Lee/The New York Times)