@HHood said:

5. I have a feeling I'll end up liking Magnaball more than IT as time passes, mainly because Magnaball's great jams never feel like they're just up there jamming for the sake of jamming (which, for all I love 03-04, is a constant 03-04 issue for me),

I could not agree more, the 03-04 jamming comment is spot on[/quote]

I agree as well. And I've had a Phish navel-gazing journey over the last few years really expanded the range where I feel like they might be jamming for jammings sake. At first I just felt really strongly that 03-04 were unfairly maligned because the actual improvisation wasn't the dropoff from 99-00 that people made it out to be. And then I started thinking all of it wasn't quite what it was cracked up to be. And then the goalpost started encroaching into Fall 98 and eventually into 97 too. Something like the Went DWD does roughly nothing for me. And a lot of big 97-00 jams seem to go through really long stretches where nobody has an idea. Sometimes that perserverence pays off like the Hampton Halley's which caps a generic jam with one of the best 4 minute stretches of Phish ever. Sometimes I can't believe that they're still riding that funk chord instead of audibling out into a new song or at least pushing the jam somewhere weirder. Maybe with time I'll start becoming more aware of the similarities of the jams in 2012, 2013, 2014 or 2015 and I'll just revise the whole thing to "93-95 Phish is the pinnacle and everywhen else certainly had its moments"

All that, and still... I have a hard time with these rankings even if we're just going on the merits of Type II Improvisation and ignoring everything else. If Coventry is in the Top 5, I refuse to believe that anything else has anything to do with the ranking.

And then I look at Magnaball and wonder just how high I'd have to put it since I find the 46 Days, Cities> Light, Tweezer-> Caspian, DWD-> Scents, Blaze On, Chalkdust> Ghost-> ?<-?-> !Rock & Roll-> Hood to be, personally, a more interesting form of improvisation than all but the upper crust of Type II from the 1.0 and 2.0 festivals.

But ranking them just on Type II just wouldn't be fair to the music. So going from a more holistic perspective but still just taking into account the announced sets of music..

1. Big Cypress
2. The Great Went
3. Magnaball
4. IT
5. Lemonwheel
6. Clifford Ball
7. Oswego
8. Superball
9. Coventry
10. Festival 8

That was way tougher than I thought it would be, and I'm not happy with the results at all. Just going to stick with the way they popped into my head first though. Seems more rational than any other order I can put them in.

One last thought, as people were killing one of the sets of Magnaball for not having enough improv, I remembered that the Great Went has a set where the highlight was a weirdo Scent of a Mule, and a whole day of the Clifford Ball's longest song is Scent Of A Mule.