@dumidiot said:

That KDF is not the best since 2012 as the above notes. Also, if you think that twist was the best jam of the year, you a) missed every other jam this year and b) enjoy a very different kind of jam than I do. Trey spent most of that song playing chords and whole notes. It felt extremely lazy and I don't know how you can talk this up when he no men was in the same show. Mostly fair review but boy oh boy, I don't know how anyone can think that twist was more than okay.

Yeah yeah down vote me, it won't make trey less lazy

ivebeentheretoo (if you're still reading) --

(1) Don't worry about downvotes. What other commenters think of your comments is less important than whether the things you're saying are right or wrong; also, the worry itself is unattractive.

(2) For a long time I would grit my teeth during any jam that Trey 'sat out' -- Phish's jamming is a four-player game, and without his voice leading from within the flock, I tended to check out. As far as I'm concerned, we long ago reached the point where Mike, Fish, and Page can run the show as a trio for long stretches -- partly because they went through a patch where they had no choice. (And at first I didn't know how to listen for the other guys during four-way jams, anyhow. They were always pretty interesting, though incomplete without their fourth.)

Still, Trey doesn't sit out this Twist; in any case, given what everyone else is up to, I'm not sure the jam would be at all deepened by Machine Gun Trey. And I've come to believe, or maybe understand, that that's what matters to Trey. Woodshedding did him a world of good chopswise and refreshed his imagination in some ways, but his job isn't to solo, even if folks outside the blast radius of the music misperceive it that way; the 'whole notes' you're bemoaning are the missing element in an extremely busy ensemble formation. It's not as if the jam doesn't build to a chestbursting peak without him playing scales up top! Sometimes all the upper-register melodic content they (feel they) need is a series of whole notes.

When a man who got famous for playing his guitar very fast and very loud decides, during the climactic jam of the deepest set of the biggest night of his professional year, that the right thing is to hold himself back and play something pure and simple, to let his best friends/coworkers (especially Mike, in this case) do the thrashing around...whether or not we prefer the other thing (which is fine!), maybe it's incumbent upon us, for our own sakes(!), to listen for what's there instead of holding it up against a moment that didn't occur.

Or maybe he got lazy. I dunno. But I wouldn't bet on it. You can say a lot of things about Trey Anastasio, but 'lazy' isn't one of them. Please consider the possibility that something else is going on, and that this music, whether or not it's to your taste -- which, again, is fine -- is complete unto itself.