This is the next installment in my Top Shelf PJJ tracks series for a year, which you can stream every track directly from Phish Just Jams. As with the previous installments, this is meant to be a list focused solely on the Phish Just Jams tracks from the year in question.

This is my version of the list for 1997, and one I have been looking forward to for a while. We usually take the top 25% or so of the jam tracks from a given year and with an incredible 276 tracks for the year we end up with a Top 70 list. This, along with 1995, is undoubtedly one of the two best years for Phish improv. 1997 completely turned live Phish music on its head

A year that featured two separate tours of Europe before hitting the States again for the Summer Tour completely transformed the band's sound in a way that would have been impossible to imagine during the Summer Tour of 1995. Unless you were one of the fortunate ones to have a solid tape connection for the Europe shows the start of the US Summer Tour was as eye opening an experience as any one could imagine. The funk just flowed effortlessly and jams appeared in unexpected places in a tour that ended in the triumph that was the Great Went.

The Fall Tour is undeniably one of the best tours the band has ever played and gives us hours of the best group improv ever performed in a rock setting. Nearly every show features at least one take away jam with some of the best and most expansive jams of all time occurring during this magical Fall Tour. Another solid New Years capped off one of the best years ever.


I'm not suggesting that it is the definitive list and there are a few choices that I could swap out with others depending on the day. I'm not ranking these 1 to 70 but just presenting the list as a whole because really what difference does it make which jam I think is 11th or 8th or 23rd or so on. The purpose of this list is just to provide a Phish Just Jams playlist of the best jams from the year. The list will be presented chronologically and can then be parsed and dissected from there.

The list tops out at an eye-popping 17 hours and is available to be streamed here or downloaded here