I have a sense that the shorter jams we are seeing are being interpreted as being "safe". I don't see it that way. Long jams, even when performed by Phish, can be masturbatory and aren't always called for. There is a time and place. While I can marvel at an hour long Runaway Jim, in the end, it usually only stands out because it is an hour long. The band's move to more self-editing is the 3.0 version of risk taking. Look at the negative response this has been getting among some of the more heady wooks - especially recently.

Yours is a really good comment, @LightsWentOut, though I'd probably take a gentler line.

I think there are two sides to fans' noisy dissatisfaction with the relatively compact jams in 2009-12 Phish. (Let's be honest: a 14-minute rock tune is not a short tune!) For one thing, you're right -- change upsets people, especially when the thing that's changing is designed specifically to be a comfortable activity in a familiar atmosphere. And yeah, there's a dull-witted possessiveness and entitlement to many of our carping fellow fans. Pure lameass egotism: check.

I sympathize on this score -- but then, I mostly listen to new Phish and don't often dip into the old stuff these days. Maybe Smeagol-Wax is gonna defeat Gollum-Wax after all.

At the same time, there's the specific thing that's changing, the length/depth of jams. Phish's 1997-onward jamming has scaffolded a particular set of listening practices -- the longer a jam goes on, the more 'monotonous' it is, the more easily it fits a specific, kinda zoned-out, mellow, 'druggy' vibe. (I know 'druggy' is imprecise but it's the connotations of sluggish contentment I'm after.)

By way of example: 'Miner' at phishthoughts.com is always on about a second set's 'flow,' and is happy to denigrate otherwise superb performances on that basis -- the question seems to be, do the song choices interfere with the deepening, mellowing, expansive, dreamy feeling that so many of those late-90s sets generated? Consider his 'go-to' Phish Phish, like 6/14/00 and 4/3/98 and the 2/28/03 Tweezer, which have that specific hazy dreaminess to them. He loved last night's Hood > WTU, which I hear as a complete mess.

In general (since maybe 1994 but definitely 1997), the longer Phish's jams go on, the more they tend to outstrip themselves, to shed their moving parts and resolve into pure unself-conscious collectivity without formal complication. That's arguably the point! Think of the 11/14/95 Stash cooling out into a haunting, spare Dog Faced Boy, then loudly digesting itself and making room for that crystalline Stash finale. Or the lilting passage in the 7/1/97 Amsterdam Ghost giving way to a quick broad-brush finale. Same with that night's Limb by Limb, not to mention the masterful 16-minute Limb from the Great Went that summer, or the well-loved Went Disease, or that same night's maybe-best-ever 2001, or...

Think too of those wonderful Fall '97 Wolfman's Brothers: hush and bliss at the E Centre, the anthemic ending in Champaign, the multifaceted jewel in Worcester (that bullshit 'Heartbreaker' jam is the very definition of 'outstripping themselves')...

I guess my point is that if you love that very specific feeling of all complication falling away, leaving behind a pure, unaffected gesture -- 'space jams' on 12/6/97 and 11/22/97, quiet Quadrophonic madness at Big Cypress, the terrifying darkness of Halloween '98 III or the 46 Days from IT -- then it really is all about the long jams. In that case, the challenging density and compactness of recent Phish would be an authentic emotional hurdle to get over.

It's like learning to listen for one particular kind of energy flow or shift, and then finding out that the musicians who delivered that one blessed thing, night after night, no longer want it like you did (and do).

Honestly, I wish they played more like 1997 Phish. I love that music so much! But I imagine that's mostly because 1997 Phish is the stuff I learned on -- it's my listening-template.

(In high school I got in trouble at All-County Jazz Band rehearsal once, for playing my sax along with the band director's solo during an improv exercise. He stopped playing and told me never to play along with the soloist. I replied that I was trying to support him -- what else was he supposed to play against? I thought we were 'jamming.' For a long time after I was confused and frustrated by that expectation in straight-up jazz groups -- because after all, Page was always jamming right along with Trey, and that's what I knew. I get it now, of course. But for a while I didn't. I'd learned differently.)

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Anyhow my point in all this is simple: @LightsWentOut is right that the band is taking enormous risks -- and I'd add that the music is in some ways better than it's ever been -- but I do wanna take a minute to sympathize and empathize with the folks who are obviously having trouble letting go of the long 'Type II' jams of yore. (I guess I'll add here that keeping that stuff interesting is really hard, and the guys probably don't practice free improv as they used to. So maybe it's not so horrible, or indeed unexpected, that they're doing (well) what they practice.)