The show gave me a contact high.

My eyes made contact with Trey Anastasio and I became as giddy as a Phish fan with a six-foot bong. Watching Trey bounce along as the band played, and seeing each musician’s massive smile was infectious. Instantly, I bopped with Trey and the rest of the tie-dyed, glowstick-waving audience.

The feeling lasted throughout the nearly three-hour show Friday in Utica, where the Trey Anastasio Band sold out and shook up the 3,000-person capacity Stanley Performing Arts Center. Trey stood in the middle of his nine-piece band, guiding a five-person horn section, drummer, percussionist, keyboardist and bassist through a menagerie of musical styles.

But the Phish frontman wasn’t always the center of attention. Each band member took a solo, giving Trey a chance to trade in his signature electric guitar for an acoustic, a triangle or nothing at all.

During a few songs, Trey turned his back to the audience and simply conducted the band. But in a black T-shirt and jeans, he seemed more Gap model than classical conductor. His buoyancy while directing gave him the look of Richard Simmons leading a group of sweaty health-nuts.

It was fitting considering a couple of the band’s more talented members should probably spend some time sweating to the oldies. Tony Markellis, the pre-Slim-Fast-John Popper fat bassist, held the group together throughout its extensive musical exploration. Blues. Jazz. Funk. Reggae. Rock. Calypso. It didn’t matter.

The other star was the multi-talented, late-career-Ella Fitzgerald fat Jennifer Hartswick. The Vermont native combined her soulful voice with Trey’s on most songs, providing the show’s most memorable solos on her trumpet and grabbing the tuba for another tune.

Hartswick’s tuba cameo came on the slow “Windora Bug,” a song with few lyrics. It started sans horn section, with Trey singing, ‘Is it a two / Or a bah?’ The song culminated when Hartswick took the stage to Trey’s answer: ‘It’s a tuba!’

Things picked up a few songs later with the show’s highlight, the sitcom-length “Mr. Completely.” Here, the band showed its true jazz roots. Each band member and section of the band rotated for different solos. At one point, the horn section left the stage to give Markellis, both drummers and the keyboardist a lengthy jam. By the time “Completely’s” chorus returned, I forgot they were playing the same song.

When it concluded, Trey gave the crowd a message from theater management: Be quiet.

They tell me they’re worried about the balcony section, he said. You’re all dancing so hard, they don’t know if the balcony can handle it. So we have to keep it quieter from here. We’ve got one more tune for you and we’ll have to keep it down. But we need all of you to be very quiet, too, he said.

Then Trey sat down, picked up his acoustic guitar and directed the horn section away from its microphones. Perched at the very edge of the stage and completely unplugged, the horns eased into the quietly beautiful “At the Gazebo.”

As it did all show, the audience responded resoundingly, smoothly transitioning from theater-shaking dance to movie-theater hush. Barely a peep was heard during “Gazebo” or Trey’s acoustic solo encore, “Pebbles and Marbles.”

If people breathed wrong during quiet time, they received a quick library “shhhh.”

The crowd also provided much of the ambiance, producing a massive, pungent haze that made smoke machines unnecessary.

On second thought, maybe that was what gave me the contact high.

Tito Bottitta is a senior information studies major. E-mail him at t1to98@aol.com.

Published on October 27, 2002 at 12:00 pm