Trey Anastasio, legendary frontman and guitarist for the band Phish will be making his first solo appearance in Milwaukee since the band’s epic and long anticipated reunion this spring. He will be playing Thursday, February 18 at the Pabst Theater.

While Trey has not released any solo work since his last album Horseshoe Curve (2007), he has been hard at work on two other projects. He released his orchestral collaboration Time Turns Elastic in May and Phish finished their most recent studio album Joy this September.

Time Turns Elastic was a project that Trey worked on with legendary composer Don Hart. This album is a full-on classical orchestrated composition with nine movements. Not intended to be started and put on random. It was created to take the listener on a journey. Following the advice of the album’s song “landslide”, the reader is supposed to experience the “ebb and flow” of the composition.

Trey sprinkles his rock and roll background into the inter-workings of a symphonic adventure. Taking you from the instrumental and gentle beginnings of movements like “Song at dawn” where Trey’s influence is in the subtle plucking of single notes all the way to a movement like “Hailstorm” where the guitar is the driving force of the symphony.

Phish’s reunion album Joy couldn’t be any more appropriately named. From the first song “Backwards down the number line” the tone of the album is set. Lyrics like “happy happy, oh my friend” and “laughing all these years, we’ve pushed through the hardships” give the fans a sense of elation in the reunion that we have been hoping for since their break up in 2004.

Songs like “Stealing time from the faulty plan” and “Kill devil falls” give us a sense of the jam band style that Phish made its name on. Driving guitar riffs and bouncy piano melodies send your mind in all sorts of directions and will keep the listener’s feet bouncing and head shaking.

The Pabst will be the perfect venue for Trey to unveil the most recent developments that he has been making to his musical style over the past year. The audience is likely to get a very eclectic and intimate show. They will get a glimpse into the varying genres of music that Trey is experimenting with. Where an accumulation of styles will be forged into something spectacular and awe dropping.

Sounds like Phish’s classic jam style, Trey’s most recent interest into the symphonic orchestration of music and even the jam-jazz that Trey dealt with on his last album Horshehose Curve will all hopefully fuse into a cacophony of music and sound that will surely delight any veteran or newcoming Trey Anastasio fan. Needless to say, Trey’s show at the Pabst Theater February 18 is a must see in the Milwaukee music scene this spring.