Studio: On March 12, 1996, Elektra Records released Surrender to the Air, featuring Trey Anastasio (guitar), Marc Ribot (guitar), Oteil (bass) and Kofi Burbridge, Jon Fishman (drums), Jon Medeski (keys/organs); Marhsall Allen, Damon Choice, and Michael Ray (all from Sun Ra's Arkestra), Bob Gullotti, and James Harvey. SITA was an experimental effort to perform jazzy stuff with little or no planning. The release was from a two-day jam session at Electric Lady Studios in New York City, sometime prior to May 1995 (according to Matthew R Levitt ). Trey described the sessions in an interview printed in the May 1995 Music Monitor: "It was very loose. Everybody was just set up in the room, and you'd just come and go as you please. Sometimes it broke down to just two people. Most of the session was spent doing free stuff. [But, he adds,] The sound I wanted was free-form and the structure I wanted was structure. It was basically a matter of figuring how to get both of those things. The problem that I don't like about most free-form things is that it meanders. And to my ear, this doesn't meander; it has direction all the time. It keeps going down a course."

Live: The participants gathered for two performances, 4-1&2-96, at the Academy (in Times Square), which was razed days later. According to Benjy Eisen , "Both Oteil Burbridge and Trey Anastasio have stated that more Surrender To The Air shows will occur at some point. The problem is amassing all eleven members together in the same town, on the same night. (Remember, STTA includes members of ARU, MMW, Phish, M. Ray and the Cosmic Krewe, and Sun Ra's Arkestra)."

See also: article from 5/3/96 Chicago Maroon.

"...the frustrating fans are ... like this one girl... led to me saying, 'I think bands feel good if they're stretching.' And she said, 'Oh, Mike! Don't do that! Don't stretch!' And pretty much the definition of Phish has been changing and stretching. And so pretty much what she was saying was, 'Don't be Phish'. She wanted Phish to be some carbon-copy of some moment in time when Phish was a certain thing." -- Mike Gordon, The Onion, 10/96