@jackl, thanks for posting this - and @safetymeeting, you're too kind. Note that there are some excellent comments on the original post (http://waxbanks.typepad.com/blog/2011/08/the-essential-explains-it-all-difference-between-phish-and-the-dead-youre-welcome.html).

And the title is tongue-in-cheek.

@Dressed_In_Gray said:

From a live standpoint, Phish always seemed to have more of a Jazz sensablilty than the Dead, focusing more on tension and release than chaos vs order. Having only one or two members dropping LSD at any one time vs the whole band just may have something to do with it as well.

For the longest time I'd have agreed 100% about Phish as 'jazzier' - but I now hear the Dead's music as more canonically 'jazzy' in this crucial sense: while a straight-ahead jazz tune might feature a fixed chord progression, it's rare to hear a small jazz ensemble that so strongly favors group coherence, as Phish does, arguably at the expense of individual performers' linear coherence. i.e. The idea of the 'solo statement' doesn't really obtain in Phish's music, as it does in e.g. 99.995% of jazz horn solos. But the Dead, for all their ensemble incoherence, did focus on their players' individual expressivity rather than collective movement.

Phish fly in a flock; the Dead milled about in a crowd. Hence the Dead's tendency to crash into each other, and the miraculous nature of their moments of collective action. We take for granted that Phish will get together every 4 or 8 or 16 bars, even take for granted that they'll spend several bars sweeping up to that climactic downbeat in perfect synchrony. Harder to generate that phenomenon outside Phish's highly-structured, even formalist improvisatory approach.